Amazing New Process For Biofuels

Wayne Simmons, the CEO of Sundrop Fuels Inc., said, "We want to use the sun to make renewable fuel. We're going to convert the sun's energy into liquid fuel using concentrated solar power to gasify biomass, then convert the biomass into gasoline or diesel." Now it looks like he has made good on that promise. The company has developed a method that converts biomass (like wood chips, straw or corn stalks -- not food like corn) that produces gasoline from renewable resources and does it cheaper and in greater quantities than any other biofuel process (at a cost of about $2 a gallon).

Simmons (pictured) is now looking for venture capital to build a demonstration plant that will produce 7 to 8 million gallons of gas each year. He predicts that a full-scale plant could produce around 100 million gallons a year. This is some pretty exciting news since other biofuel processes are expensive and produce only limited quantities of fuel from food products. Fellow blogger Adam Cohen over at Zero Energy Construction has the full story. Here is some of what he writes:

The new technology has the potential to revolutionize the biofuels industry, experts say, because it removes one of the long-term cost hurdles to creating fuel from organic waste.

The company blasts organic materials, such as wood chips and straw, with superhigh temperatures gathered from sunshine. The heat tears the material apart on a molecular level, adds the sun’s heat energy in the thermo-chemical reaction, and creates a synthetic gas that can be formed into gasoline or diesel fuel.

Sundrop’s solar reactor, near the top of the tower, operates at temperatures of 1,200 to 1,300 degrees Celsius (2,200 to 2,400 degrees Fahrenheit) using the heat reflected from the mirrors.

By comparison, concentrated solar-power plants, which use the sun’s reflected heat to generate steam for electricity, typically operate at around 500 degrees Celsius (more than 900 degrees Fahrenheit), Simmons said.

When vehicles burn biofuels made from plants, they’re relatively carbon-neutral. That means there’s little or no net gain in carbon-dioxide emissions from cars using the synthetic fuel, because the CO2 comes from the biomass grown in the last year or so, rather than from fossil fuels formed millions of years ago.

Sundrop’s reactor can use any kind of biomass, including plants grown specifically for their energy content. The organic biomass material is dropped into the reactor; the high temperatures vaporize it in seconds. The molecules are torn apart and recombined to form a synthetic gas (syngas), made up of hydrogen and carbon—which can be turned into gasoline, diesel, plastics, or chemicals.

"Gasification of organic material to make synthetic gas has been done. But traditional gasifiers burn a large percentage of the biomass, or a fossil fuel such as natural gas, to reach operating temperatures above 1,000 degrees Celsius (1,832 degrees Fahrenheit). Sundrop’s process uses the free sunshine as its fuel source, and—as a plus—picks up some of the sun’s heat energy in the chemical process. As a result, Sundrop can produce 100 to 125 gallons of fuel per ton of dry biomass, about twice what conventional gasification plants are getting. It also needs just a half gallon of water—and its hydrogen molecules—to produce a gallon of fuel, compared to six gallons or more needed by traditional gasification technology," Simmons said.

"The high temperatures also mean not producing tar as a waste byproduct, which happens with traditional gasification processes. The fuel is identical to petroleum on a molecular level and can be shipped in existing pipelines, pumped in existing fuel pumps, and burned in existing vehicle engines—no new infrastructure is needed," he said.

This is exactly the type of forward-thinking that this country really needs. Our idiot politicians are thinking of nothing but further destroying our environment (and soon our economy) with more and more drilling for carbon-based fuels like oil, with little thought about the fact that we are nearing or at the point of "peak oil" (the point at which production drops no matter how much drilling is done). Like it or not, oil is a finite resource and will have to be replaced sooner than later -- hopefully with a renewable and cleaner energy.

I urge you to go on over to Zero Energy Construction and read the whole story.