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Researchers from 10 other institutions on a techno-economic and sustainability analysis of the life cycle of the process: single-step catalytic conversion of ethanol into hydrocarbon blends that can be added to jet fuels, diesel or gasoline to reduce your greenhouse gas emissions. This new technology is called consolidated dehydration and oligomerization, or cado. The analysis, which was published in the   proceedings of the national academy of sciences,   showed that this single-step process for converting wet ethanol vapor could produce blends at $2/gigajoule (gj) today and $1.44/gj in the future. As the process is refined, including operating and annualized capital costs. Sustainable fuels the blend material would therefore be competitive with conventional jet fuel produced from petroleum at historically high prices of around $100/barrel. At $60 per barrel of oil, using existing incentives for sustainable and renewable fuels results in price parity, according to the analysis.

The conversion uses a type of catalyst called zeolite, which directly produces longer hydrocarbon chains from the original alcohol, in this case ethanol, replacing a traditional multi-step process with one that uses less energy and is highly efficient. "The robustness of the catalyst enables direct conversion of wet ethanol, which greatly simplifies the process, reduces the cost of ethanol purification, and makes the production costs of hydrocarbon blends Email Marketing List  competitive according to the analysis," said zhenglong li, biomass catalysis staff scientist at ornl and a collaborator on the project. While this one-step catalysis was effective at laboratory scale, additional testing and improvements by vertimass resulted in even higher product yields when scaled up 300-fold using commercial catalyst formulations. The conversion operation could be integrated into new biofuel plants or installed as bolt-on technology to existing ethanol plants with minimal capital investment, the researchers noted.



A life cycle analysis of the conversion process found that its greenhouse gas emissions profile is similar to that of ethanol fed to the process. "The sustainability of bioderived ethanol, now produced primarily from corn in the united states, but now some made from corn stove and eventually dedicated biomass feedstocks such as switchgrass, continues the catalytic process," said brian davison, director scientist for the doe center for bioenergy innovation (cbi) at ornl and a collaborator on the project. Vertimass's improvements to the original lab-scale process include the development of cheaper forms of the catalyst, as well as more than doubling the performance of liquid sustainable fuels, the paper noted. The document details improvements and analysis results from argonne national laboratory, the national renewable energy laboratory, vertimass and ornl in collaboration with dartmouth, the federal aviation administration, boeing, pennsylvania state university, the university of california -ri Of energy's office of science, the largest single supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the united states.