The Fuel of the Future Is Grassoline

By now it ought to be clear that we must get off oil. We can no longer afford
the dangers that our overwhelming dependence on petroleum poses for our
national security, our economic security or our environmental security. Yet
civilization is not about to not stop moving, and so we must develop a new
way to power the worlds transportation fleet. Biofuels, or liquid fuels made
from plant material, remain the most technically promising alternative.
Biofuels can be made from anything that is, or ever was, a plant. Firstgeneration biofuels are made from edible biomass such as corn or
sugarcane. Although we already possess the technology to convert these
feedstocks into fuels (as evidenced by the nearly 200 refineries currently
processing corn into ethanol in the U.S.), there is simply not enough corn,
sugar cane or vegetable oil to provide more than about 10 percent of the
liquid fuel needs of developed countries such as ours. These first generation
biofuels also compete for farmland with crops used for human food and
animal feed, which complicates the calculations of the environmental costs
and benefits associated with them. We need biofuel raw materials that are
cheap, abundant and that do not interfere with food production.
The winner in all three categories is cellulosic biomasswoods, grasses and
inedible stalks of plants. Fuel made out of this biomasswhat well call
grassolinecould come from dozens, if not hundreds, of potential sources,
from wood residues such as sawdust and construction debris, to agricultural
wastes such as corn stalks, to energy cropsfast-growing grasses and
woody materials that are grown expressly for their energy content.

The Energy Lock

Cellulosic biomass has been designed by evolution to give structure to a

plant. It features rigid scaffolds of interlocking molecules that provide

support for vertical growth. It also stubbornly resists biological breakdown.
Scientists must find a way to defeat natures highly effective design.
On the molecular level, biomass consists largely of carbon, hydrogen and
oxygen stored in the plant cell wall. Liquid fuels are made of carbon and
hydrogen. Thus, from a chemical engineering perspective, refining biomass
requires a simple removal of most of the oxygen molecules from the biomass
feedstock. The remaining carbon and hydrogen (with some remaining
oxygen) become the various fuel products. One of the huge advantages of
grassolineas opposed to first generation biofuelsis that grassoline isnt
synonymous with ethanol. You can make anything thats found in crude oil
from cellulosic biomass.
The general strategy that scientists use to create fuels from biomass
involves first deconstructing the solid biomass into smaller molecules, then
refining these products into a fuel. Low-temperature deconstruction (50
degrees C to 200 degrees C) produces sugars can be fermented into ethanol
in much the same way that grain or sugar crops are. Deconstruction at
higher temperatures (400 degrees C to 600 degrees C) produces a bio-crude
or bio-oil, which can be converted into gasoline or diesel. Extremely high
temperature deconstruction (700 degrees C to 1,000 degrees C) produces a
gas called syn-gas, which can be converted into fuel by 80-year-old syn-gas
conversion technologies.
The best pathway is one that converts the maximum amount of the
biomass energy into a liquid biofuel at the lowest costs. We dont know yet
which pathway(s) will be the most economical. It may be that different
pathways will be used on different cellulosic biomass materials. Hightemperature processing might be best for woods, whereas grasses may work
better at low temperatures.
Hot Fuel
The most technically developed pathway to biofuels is the route that runs
through the high-temperature gasification process to produce syn-gas. Syngas is a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen that can be made from

any carbon containing material. Syn-gas can be transformed into diesel fuel,
gasoline or ethanol using a process called Fischer-Tropsch Synthesis (FTS)
that was developed by German scientists in the 1920s. The Third Reich used
FTS during World War II to create liquid fuel out of Germanys coal reserves.
Most of the major oil companies still have a syn-gas conversion technology
that they may introduce under the right economic conditions.
The first step to produce syn-gas is called gasification. In this process
biomass is fed into a reactor and heated to temperatures between 800
degrees C to 1,200 degrees C. It is then mixed with steam or oxygen to
produce a gas containing carbon monoxide (CO), hydrogen gas, and tars. The
tars must first be cleaned out and the gas compressed to 20 to 70
atmospheres. Both of these steps can be expensive. The compressed syngas then flows over a specially designed catalysta solid material thats
designed to hold the individual reactant molecules and preferentially
encourage particular chemical reactions. Syn-gas conversion catalysts have
been developed by the petroleum chemistry primarily for converting natural
gas and coal-derived syn-gas into fuels.
Though the technology is well understood, the reactors are expensive. An
FTS plant in Qatar to convert natural gas into 34,000 barrels per day of liquid
fuels was projected to cost $1 billion to 1.5 billion. To pay off these high
capital costs, a biomass gasification plant would have to consume around
5,000 tons of biomass per day, every day, for a period of 15 to 30 years.
There are significant logistic and economic challenges with getting this
amount of biomass to a single location, and so research in this area focuses
on ways to reduce the capital costs.
Bio-Oil
Another way to convert biomass into fuel is to first transform it into an oil,
then refine this bio-oil in much the same way you would refine raw crude. A
refinery heats up the biomass to 300 degrees C to 600 degrees C in an
oxygen-free environment. The heat breaks the biomass down into a charcoallike solid and the bio-oil, giving off some gas in the process. The bio-oil
produced by this method is the cheapest liquid biofuel on the market today,
perhaps $0.50 per gallon (in addition to the cost of the raw biomass). The

process can also be carried out in relatively small factories that are close to
where biomass is harvested. Yet like a crude, this bio-oil is very poor quality.
It is highly acidic, not soluble with petroleum-based fuels and has half the
energy content of gasoline. Although you can burn bio-oil directly in a diesel
engine, you should only attempt it if you no longer have a need for your
diesel engine.
Oil refineries could convert this bio-crude into a usable fuel, however, and
many companies are studying how they could convert their existing
refineries into plants capable of doing so. Some are already producing green
diesel fuel by co-feeding vegetable oils and animal fats with petroleum oil
directly into their refinery. Conoco-Phillips currently produces around 300
barrels of biodiesel per day in its Borger, Texas, plant by refining the waste
fat from cows at a nearby slaughterhouse.
Researchers are also figuring out ways to process biomass using the
chemical engineering equivalent of one-pot cookingconverting the solid
biomass to oil then the oil into fuel inside a single reactor. The research
group of one of us (Huber) is developing an approach called catalytic fast
pyrolysis that would do just that. The fast in fast pyrolysis comes from the
initial heatingonce biomass enters the reactor, it is heated to 500 degrees
C in a second. This heating breaks down the large biomass molecules into
smaller molecules. Like eggs and an egg carton, these small molecules are
now the perfect size and shape to fit into the surface of a catalyst. Once
ensconced inside the catalysts pores, the molecules go through a series of
reactions that change them into gasolinespecifically, the high-value
aromatic components of gasoline that increase the octane. The entire
process takes just two to 10 seconds. Already the startup company
Anellotech is attempting to scale this process up to the commercial scale. Its
first test plant is expected by 2014.
Sugar Solution
The route that has attracted most of the public and private investment thus
far relies on a more traditional mechanismunlock the sugars in the plant,
then ferment these sugars into ethanol. Yet nature designed plant materials
to resist biological breakdown; thus, the job of the engineer is to defeat those

barriers that nature put up. Perhaps not surprisingly, this task has proven to
be task.
Scientists have studied literally dozens of possible ways to break down
cellulose. You can do it mechanically, using heat or gamma rays. You can
grind the material into a fine slurry or subject it to high-temperature steam.
You can douse it with concentrated acids or bases, or bathe it in an
appropriate solvent. You can even genetically engineer biological organisms
that will eat and digest the cellulose.
While its impossible to say which methods will end up being the most
successful (and different methods will probably tailored for the particular
feedstock), many techniques that may be successful in the lab have no
chance of succeeding in commercial practice. The pretreatments must
generate easily fermentable sugars at high yields and concentrations,
conserve nutrients in the biomass and be implemented with modest capital
costs. They shouldnt use toxic materials or require too much energy input to
work. Most important, they must be cheap.
The most promising approaches right now involve subjecting the biomass to
extremes of pH and temperature. One approach that uses ammoniaa
strong baseis being developed at a laboratory run by one of us (Dale). In
the ammonia fiber expansion (AFEX) process, biomass plant material is
cooked with hot concentrated ammonia under pressure. When the pressure
is released, the ammonia evaporates and is recycled. The treated biomass
gives high sugar yields of 90 percent or more following a final conversion by
enzymes. This approach minimizes the side effect of sugar degradation that
often occurs in acid or high temperature environments. The AFEX process
also is dry to dry: biomass starts as a mostly dry solid and is left dry after
treatment, undiluted with water. It thus provides high ethanol at high
concentrations.
It also has the potential to be very cheap: a recent economic analysis
showed that, assuming biomass can be delivered to the plant for around $80
a ton, AFEX pretreatment can produce cellulosic ethanol for around $1.40 per
gallon. If we project to a future where a streamlined agricultural

infrastructure exists, and assume a mature process in which the processing

costs are about 30 percent of the overall grassoline production costs (as it is
in the oil refining business today), grassoline will be delivered to the pump
for around $2 per gallon.