Research Yields Gasoline from Sawdust (STA BREAKING NEWS and ARCHIVES)

by pragnos , Wednesday, December 03, 2014, 10:21 @ Theresa

"T";
Good catch though it seems plausible, it has some very challenging scale up issues. I have seen at least one very high profile scheme of this general biomass to fuels concept fail badly with big losses for US Gov. and state of Miss and that is the saga of Vinod Khosla's pet project KiOR. I know one of the founders and very quickly I recognized the Achilles heel their process had and they didn't want to talk to me about it. Anello is another potentially unworkable scheme of biomass to petrochemicals. The fatal flaw in both companies' processes is that the wood ash that is left behind overwhelms and kills the catalyst. The scheme you have flagged still has to deal with the ash, but it may be less of a problem. However, this scheme requires an external source of hydrogen which conventionally is made from natural gas. To make it green the hydrogen will have to come from either wind or solar PV powered electrolysis of water which is doable, but very expensive. The other limitation is that the reaction is batch and takes hours to complete which makes the productivity of the machinery low and thus expensive. Further, if we begin converting massive amounts of biomass to fuels, the biomass will start becoming very valuable and expensive! Oh and if I read the abstract right one of the key catalyst materials uses ruthenium which is so rare and expensive no one could ever commercialize the process--a kiss of death to anything but further academic papers.

I was working on a project at Grace before they punched me out 10 yrs ago that might actually work to convert biomass into hydrocarbons, but Grace had no interest at the time and I haven't talked to anyone who would fund the research. The funding pipeline is pretty well rigged to the politically correct and connected sycophants. Loners can go screw themselves.

Right now there are two piles of wood chips down the street that are visibly giving off a little steam at the top from natural decomposition--what does that mean? --pragnos