Today in Biofuels Opinion: “We’d be much better off just putting the natural gas directly into cars.”

From the New York Times: “The catch is that biobutanol has always been very expensive to produce (which is why it was abandoned after widespread use in the first half of the 20th century). DuPont says it has a new way of making biobutanol, using a microbe. “We will be at a cost-equivalent of ethanol on an energy basis,” Mr. Fanandakis predicted. Ron Lamberty of the American Coalition for Ethanol said that currently biobutanol’s fuel yield per bushel of corn is currently less than half that of ethanol. But even if biobutanol is able to scale, he saw no competition between it and ethanol.

From the Energy Tribune: “Methanol makes a fine racing fuel but is entirely unsuited for mass market application.
I’m perplexed why one member of Congress would be quoted as saying he wouldn’t have supported the Waxman-Markey bill without its methanol provision…Start with the energy side of these drawbacks. Turning natural gas into methanol consumes around 1/3 of the energy content of the gas…We’d be much better off just putting the natural gas directly into cars. Then there’s fuel economy…While a car running on E85 typically uses 40% more fuel per mile than on gasoline, you’d need 75% more M85 to go the same distance…As if these practical considerations weren’t a sufficient disqualification…methanol is a neurotoxin. Ingesting even a small quantity can lead to blindness or death.”

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