by Jim Lane (Biofuels Digest) Broadening the sources and uses for cellulosic ethanol.
As we reported yesterday (October 6, 2014) in the Digest, DuPont and Procter & Gamble, announced a collaboration to use cellulosic ethanol in North American Tide laundry detergent, a first of its kind. Tide Cold Water will be the first brand in the world to blend cellulosic ethanol in a scalable and commercial way.
DuPont will produce at the (just about completed) Nevada, Iowa biorefinery, which has a planned capacity of 30 million gallons per year.
Tide Cold Water “powered by nature” will re-purpose over 7000 tons of agricultural waste a year. This will be equivalent to the power needed to do all the washing in homes across California for over a month. The company is making its products better, so it is easier for everyone to make a small change every day to care for the environment. (That equates to around 500,000 gallons of cellulosic ethanol per year).
It’s another sign that sources and uses are proliferating in the cellulosic ethanol space. Let’s look at some of the implications.
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It’s also one of the few announced cases of cellulosic ethanol purposed for industrial rather than the fuel markets.
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The other major upgrade market has been renewable jet fuel, specifically alcohol to jet, which we have described as “conceptually powerful.”
If you dehydrate ethanol (that is, remove the water, H2O), what you have is ethylene, a hydrocarbon. And you are the road to a longer-chain range of molecules such as kerosene — and there are existing chemistries to make that transformation.
Byogy has been developing one of these — a four-step process of dehydration, oligomerization, and hydrogenation that has picked up some heavyweight airline interest.
Another technology has emerged in recent months. A catalytic process developed originally at Oak Ridge, that also dehydrates ethanol — but instead of producing pure ethylene, it converts ethanol in one step to a range of diesel and jet molecules, with only about 3% ethylene content in that step. That’s Vertimass. More on that here. READ MORE and MORE (PRWEB)