Where Did Biofuels Technologies Come from?

June 02, 2016

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by Gerald Kutney (Lee Consulting/Biofuels Digest) ... From the time of the caveman until the early Industrial Revolution, biofuels – namely wood and the advanced biofuel of the day, charcoal – reigned supreme. Both fossil fuels and biofuels originate from biomass. The major difference between them is that fossil fuels are sequestered carbon, and biofuels are renewable carbon. Nowadays, the basic technologies to treat biomass for conversion into fuel (or energy) can be logically placed into four general categories:

MECHANICAL: Traditional routes for woody debris are strictly mechanical treatments such as chipping or grinding the material. Greater densification takes place by pelletizing the biomass.
THERMOCHEMICAL: Combustion converts biomass into energy, while pyrolysis technology converts biomass into fuel. The latter process not only yields greater energy density than mechanical treatment but the fuel properties are chemically and physically more similar to fossil fuels than the original biomass. A related process is gasification which produces syngas which is a platform technology for the production of a variety of liquid biofuels, through the Fischer-Tropsch (FT) process.
CHEMICAL: A route for production of transportation fuels which includes biodiesel, FT, and some cellulosic ethanol processes.
BIOCHEMICAL: A common route for production of fuel ethanol from sugar or starch fermentation, and the production of biogas (methane) under anaerobic conditions.

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In this review, I have attempted to identify the inventors and entrepreneurs behind the biofuel technologies listed in the table above. Many are unknown in the modern biofuel literature and far pre-date the names often quoted. Though biofuels appear to have only recently emerged (in response to the threat of climate change), this review illustrates the long rich tradition of their development and utility.

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1826 – Ethanol-Fuel ...

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By the beginning of the 20^th century, ethanol was already a popular automobile fuel. In 1902, there was an automobile race in France for only ethanol-fueled vehicles, and in the same year, there was a conference held in Paris, Congress des Applications de L’Alcool Denature, by the Automobile Club of France and the Ministry of Agriculture. During the 1920’s, fuel blends had reached 50% ethanol, but engine problems were reported and blends were cut back to 25%. Germany was also an early pioneer in fuel alcohol. In 1899, the Centrale fur Spiritus Verwerthung established a tariff-subsidy program to allow ethanol to be price-competitive against regular gasoline. Between 1887 and 1904, German ethanol production rose from 40 million liters to 100 million liters, and reached 250 million liters by the beginning of World War I. And when oil supplies were cut off during the War, most vehicles were switched over to pure ethanol. By 1935, fuel ethanol in Europe totaled 500 million liters: France – 290 million liters, Germany – 47 million liters, Czechoslovakia – 41 million liters.

The country that would lead the world in fuel ethanol during the second half of the 20^th century was Brazil. In 1931, the first law was passed requiring gasoline importers to purchase 5% of their volumes as ethanol. And two years later, the Instituto do Assucar e do Alcool was established to promote fuel alcohol. At this time, there was only one ethanol producer in Brazil, who was producing 100,000 liters. By 1939, there were 31, with an annual production of more than 50 million liters. During World War II, production reached 77 million liters and fuel blends were as high as 50%.

The great American ethanol-fuel entrepreneur was Henry Ford. When he designed his first car in 1896, the Quadricycle, it was designed to run on pure ethanol, as was the original Model-T. Henry Ford also supported the Agrol Company, a grain-to-ethanol facility, as it rolled out a 10% ethanol-fuel blend across 2,000 service stations during the Depression. In 1925, Ford stated:

The fuel of the future is going to come from fruit like that sumach out by the road, or from apples, weeds, sawdust — almost anything. There is fuel in every bit of vegetable matter that can be fermented. There’s enough alcohol in one year’s yield of an acre of potatoes to drive the machinery necessary to cultivate the fields for a hundred years.

Eight years earlier, similar words had been spoken by another entrepreneurial visionary, Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922):

There is, however, one other source of fuel supply which may perhaps solve this problem of the future. Alcohol makes a beautiful, clean, and efficient fuel, and, where not intended for consumption by human beings, can be manufactured very cheaply in an indigestible or even poisonous form. Wood alcohol, for example, can be employed as a fuel, and we can make alcohol from sawdust, a waste product of our mills.

Alcohol can also be manufactured from corn stalks, and in fact from almost any vegetable matter capable of fermentation. Our growing crops and even weeds can be used. The waste products of our farms are available for this purpose and even the garbage from our cities. We need never fear the exhaustion of our present fuel supplies so long as we can produce an annual crop of alcohol to any extent desired.

The world will probably depend upon alcohol more and more as time goes on, and a great field of usefulness is opening up for the engineer who will modify our machinery to enable alcohol to be used as the source of power.

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1846 – Biodiesel – Straight vegetable oil (SVO) was the first known liquid fuel and had been known since the beginning of civilization (see above). Freidrich Rochieder (1819-74) in 1846 and the Irish chemist Patrick J. Duffy (1829-87) in 1853 discovered the transesterification of such oils, and the process was patented to produce a fuel by Georges Chavanne (1875–1941) in 1937.

Returning to SVO, Rudolph Diesel (1858-1913), himself, built a model of his engine which ran on peanut oil in 1900, and he later proudly espoused SVO for the Diesel engine:

But it is not yet generally known that it is possible to use animal and vegetable oils direct in Diesel motors. In 1900 a small Diesel engine was exhibited at the Paris exhibition by the Otto Company, which, on the suggestion of the French government, was run on Arachide oil, and operated so well that very few people were aware of the fact. The motor was built for ordinary oils, and without any modification was run on vegetable oil. I have repeated these experiments on a large scale with full success and entire confirmation of the results formerly obtained. The French Government had in mind the utilization of the large quantities of arachide or ground nuts available in the African colonies and easy to cultivate, for, by this means, the colonies can be provided with power and industries, without the necessity of importing coal or liquid fuel,

Similar experiments have also been made in St. Petersburg with castor oil with equal success. Even animal oils, such as fish oil, have been tried with perfect success.

If at present the applicability of vegetable and animal oils to Diesel motors seems insignificant, it may develop in the course of time to reach an importance equal to that of natural liquid fuels and tar oil. Twelve years ago we were no more advanced with the tar oils than to-day is the case with the vegetable oils; and how important have they now become!

We cannot predict at present the role which these oils will have to play in the colonies in days to come. However, they give the certainty that motive power can be produced by the agricultural transformation of the heat of the sun, even when our total natural store of solid and liquid fuel will be exhausted. READ MORE

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