Your Regular Audi Could Run on Straw Soon

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April 18, 2018

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by Francois De Beaupuy and Ania Nussbaum (Bloomberg) Global Bioenergies looks to extract fuels from non-food crops; Unlike ethanol, fuel works in any engine in high concentration — A German luxury carmaker and a French biotech company have joined forces to solve the two big problems that have been holding back biofuels.

On a windy morning at a track near Paris this month, Audi AG started testing gasoline blended with 34 percent of a biofuel produced from sugar beet waste in one of its classic A4 sedans. Unlike ethanol, which requires special engines when used in large proportions, the new blend can work in any car engine without modification.

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“We’re using the non-eatable part of the sugar beet,” said Marc Delcourt, Chief Executive Officer of Global Bioenergies SA, the French company that made the bio gasoline tested by Audi.

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The biofuel that powered the white Audi A4 around the circuit near Paris originated at Global Bioenergies’s demo plant in Leuna, Germany, and was converted by the country’s Fraunhofer Institute into gasoline additives. The company has 32 patents to develop bacteria which transforms sugar found in corn, beet, wheat straw and wood chips into isobutene, a hydrocarbon usually derived from oil, which ended up in the Audi engine.

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Car companies including Audi are convinced that electric vehicles won’t be enough to quickly reduce emissions, especially in countries where power will continue to largely be produced by burning fossil fuels. They are therefore doing research on engines powered by alternative fuels such as hydrogen, and renewable resources such as agricultural waste.

“If we want to stop climate change, we need renewable fuels,” Hermann Pengg, who oversees Audi’s biofuels research, said at the track near Paris. “Electric vehicles are important to help us cut CO2 emissions, but only if you use green electricity, not if you use coal.”

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However, biofuels are costly and sustained lower crude oil prices may restrict a desire to blend them into the fuel mix, while electric vehicles may depress demand over the long term, according to James Evans, an analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence. Still, biofuels “could be a useful transition fuel to shift towards a lower-carbon transport system,” he said. READ MORE

Global Bioenergies: Audi fuels vehicle with 34 percent biofuel (Biomass Magazine)

Audi tops podium with joint development of biofuel that produces less CO2. (Bio-Based World News)

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