Greater Transportation Energy and GHG Offsets from Bioelectricity Than Ethanol

admin — Fri, 08 May 2009 17:59:42 +0000

The quantity of land available to grow biofuel crops withoutimpacting food prices or greenhouse gas emissions from landconversion is limited. Therefore, bioenergy should maximizeland-use efficiency when addressing transportation and climatechange goals. Biomass could power either internal combustionor electric vehicles, but the relative land-use efficiency ofthese two energy pathways is not well quantified. Here, we showthat bioelectricity outperforms ethanol across a range of feedstocks,conversion technologies, and vehicle classes. Bioelectricityproduces an average 81% more transportation kilometers and 108%more emissions offsets per unit area cropland than cellulosicethanol. These results suggest that alternative bioenergy pathwayshave large differences in how efficiently they use the availableland to achieve transportation and climate goals.

Four basic steps in converting Biomass to Bioethanol/Ethanol

admin — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 19:39:13 +0000

Producing biomass results in the fixing of atmospheric carbon dioxide into organic carbon.

Converting this biomass to a useable fermentation feedstock (typically some form of sugar) can be achieved using a variety of different process technologies. These processes for fermentation feedstock production constitute the critical differences among all of the bioethanol technology options.

Fermenting the biomass intermediates using biocatalysts (microorganisms including yeast and bacteria) to produce ethanol in a relatively dilute aqueous solution is probably the oldest form of biotechnology developed by humankind.

Processing the fermentation product yields fuel-grade ethanol and byproducts that can be used to produce other fuels, chemicals, heat and/or electricity.

Source

Info-Ethanol.Com » biomass

Greater Transportation Energy and GHG Offsets from Bioelectricity Than Ethanol

Four basic steps in converting Biomass to Bioethanol/Ethanol