Advanced BioFuels USA

by Jim Lane (Biofuels Digest) … Yes, you can feed CO2, water and sunlight to the Terebinth and it will produce a precursor to clear plastic bottles. The two other precursors can be made from plant sugars (ethylene glycol) and wood tar (phthalic acid). Fermenting sugars and distilling wood are Bronze Age technologies, boring old tech when Socrates walked the earth.

…

The problem, as with so much of biology, is that humanity is impatient and cheap, and plants do not make our preferred products at the rates and yields we want.

…

In La Jolla, the Schmidt Futures’ crack bioeconomy brigade, ably led by Genevieve Croft and Mary Maxon, has created a Convening of the Worthies (my name for it, not theirs) to consider what might be done to accelerate the transition to circular feedstocks.

…

The time is right; chemicals and materials have gained scant attention from a world interested in new fuels, vehicles and net zero tailpipes. Yet, they are created from petroleum in co-processing that also makes gasoline. You make the one because you are making the other, more or less.

No gasoline? No cushions, no plastics, no cars, no houses, and so forth, except with painful, exorbitant transformation of refinery process. The end of the era of co-processing chemicals with gasoline, if not exactly nigh upon us, at least is certainly being handed its hat and coat and being given directions to the door.

Enter, the bioeconomy.

…

So cometh the hard yards of the bioeconomy task. Tailoring the product to meet a spec, increasing the yield, and finding an affordable way to extract it. The plant or residue doesn’t understand what we are trying to do with it, despite our best efforts to explain our bold goals to them.

…

This week, Schmidt Futures and their partners, the Foundation for Food & Agricultural Research, have convened not only an impressive group, they’ve uncovered hundreds of ideas, far too many. 

…

There are differing and complex thoughts about scale, timelines, feedstock families, products of interest, some like ferm, some prefer therm.

…

So I stay positive about all promising technology, but I make an extra effort to smile when methane or syngas is mentioned; gases in general.

Yes, I can hear your “how dare you” already, ringing in my ear like a jet engine. So let me explain. We have valuable large market products we can make from it, such as fuels and plastics. We have pipelines to move it for bioconversion, an accounting system known as book-and-claim to minimize the use of carbon to move feedstock, and we have technology in the form of anaerobic digestion. Methane can be converted to jet fuel, diesel and so forth. It is a very useful platform intermediate for the bioeconomy. It also gives a target for every complex biomass — make methane, and let others make products from methane.

…

Starch, the products and processes of anaerobic digestion, the pursuit of homogenous feedstocks, the world of better modeling, the biology-chemistry linkage, data and knowledge sharing, and waste gases as platform feedstocks or intermediates.

…

I am astonished, and happily so, that Schmidt Futures took this on, and found FFAR to partner with. I have long thought that stuff like clothes, car parts, housing materials are the forgotten victims of climate change and climate remediation. It is good to see materials on the front burner, circularity a mandate, and feedstocks the focus.  READ MORE