Second generation biofuels that are made from feedstocks like wood or straw may offer the promise of less disruption to land use and food production but they are still some way off commercial introduction according to a sustainable energy consultant speaking at an AW Briefing event in London.
Adam Chase of E4tech told delegates that a number of different approaches to second generation biofuels are being investigated but that many commercial applications are 5-10 years away.
“The prize is being able to produce fuel from something that is abundant and not grown on agricultural land. But it is quite likely that the first implementations we will see will be in conjunction with first generation operations.
“If you are already taking, for example, corn and you can process a bit more of that plant then you can have first generation and second generation together, increasing the yield that you get from the corn.”
Chase said that there is a variant on ethanol production which is butanol, similar to ethanol but with better chemical properties and energy density.
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“That’s another approach being investigated, as is turning wood into a gas and then turning that into a fuel such as diesel or jet fuel. That requires big scale and heavy investment but is being taken seriously,” he said.
There’s also R&D going into the ‘part cooking of wood’ – pyrolysis – to produce oil. “This may help to overcome the low energy density (and therefore cost) of transporting wood, or it may turn out a simpler route for producing a vehicle fuel,” Chase believes.
Looking beyond second generation biofuels, he also held out the hope that mass-produced algae could be an energy source.
“There are companies aiming to grow algae at industrial scale using light and carbon dioxide to feed them. At the point where they have grown to their maximum extent, you harvest them, you squash them and that produces an oil that can be further processed into fuel.”
That, Chase says, is at an experimental stage, but there are ‘big hopes’.
However, he cautioned that second generation biofuels do not necessarily mean a clean transition from the land use problem.
“Second generation processes that use, for example, large quantities of wood grown on agricultural land could still have big land use implications,” he said.
Dave Leggett
See also: The future of road vehicle fuels – forecasts to 2020 (download)
