Ethanol’s big brother

Ethanol is a hot candidate as a gasoline replacement, but the longer-chained alcohol butanol could be a strong competitor. Butanol is less corrosive, safer to work with, it can be mixed with diesel and it can also be converted to a possible jet fuel. A review in the latest issue of Journal of Chemical Technology and Biotechnology gives a critical outline of butanol’s potential as a sustainable fuel.

Compared to the anti-knock index of gasoline, butanol's fuel conversion efficiency is much better, making butanol an interesting candidate for gasoline replacement. Not only are the existing pipelines capable of transporting butanol, but butanol boils and ignites at higher temperatures than ethanol and therefore is safer in everyday handling.

As the authors Benjamin G. Harvey and Heather A. Meylemans show in their article, butanol can be converted to short-chained hydrocarbons – good candidates for jet fuels because of their excellent cold flow properties.

However, “production and use of butanol is still in its infancy”, the authors write. Producing butanol from biomass is a problem: the compound is toxic to the bacteria that form it from glucose - it therefore kills its own producers. Researchers are working on making the bacteria more resistant to ethanol’s big brother.

Visit the article at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jctb.2540/abstract