Inexpensive alcohol made of any organic material

The American Coskata developed a new process to make the ethyl alcohol. The process makes it possible to apply any organic raw materials, including solid household wastes, old tires, wastes from wood processing etc. One liter of alcohol obtained with the new technology costs 26 cents ($1/gallon).

The technology will be applied primarily to produce the motor fuel. Presently, the alcohol fuel, bioethanol, is made in USA mainly of vegetable raw materials, corn first of all. Such alcohol is rather expensive, besides the use of the arable land for "biofuel" cultures causes the food price rise . This explains the interest for fuel ethanol production from non-food raw materials.

Coskata managed to combine in one technology both the traditional chemical and biochemical approaches. On the first stage, the raw material is gasified - the organic molecules are tansformed in the presence of a catalyst to synthetic gas, a mixture of CO and hydrogen. The synthetic gas is well known in the chemical industry, primarily as the base to generate another alcohol - methanol. Besides, the synthetic gas can be used to obtain hydrocarbons and other valuable chemical compounds.

Coscata uses the synthetic gas to obtain the ethyl alcohol. The company gave up using traditional catalysts and replaced them by specially selected bacteria presenting the specific know-how of the process. The developer call them "proprietary" bacteria . Microorganisms inhabiting bioreactor consume synthetic gas and generate high purity ethanol while traditional catalysts produce alcohol mixtures demanding additional separation and purification. Besides, bacteria are non so sensitive against catalysts poisons (for instance sulfuric compounds) making thus possible to lower the cost of the process by avoiding purification stage.

The Coscata idea has drawn the attention of automobile branch. The implementation of the process will be supported by General Motors.

Дата:  17.12.2008

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