Biobutanol is Latest (Small) Biofuel Aspirant

Gevo said this morning that it had successfully retrofitted a demonstration-scale ethanol plant to make biobutanol. And the privately held biofuels start-up also said it planned to pound the pavement on Wall Street looking for financing to go out and buy up to five ethanol plants to retrofit.

Why would they do this? Biobutanol is an alcohol similar to ethanol. Both can be used as a gasoline additive. But biobutanol has some clear advantages. There is no blend wall – ethanol’s 10% limit in gasoline. Biobutanol is approved to get to 16% today – and Gevo, which is backed by investors including Khosla Ventures, Burrill & Co. and Total SA – says that “standard automotive engines can run on biobutanol blended into gasoline at any ratio.”

(Others are excited about biobutanol, including Butamax, the terribly named joint venture between BP and DuPont. Who names their joint venture after something so reminiscent of the unsuccessful Betamax videotape format?)

Another advantage – experts say that biobutanol can be put into pipelines and refineries without problems. Try running ethanol through a pipeline. It worked kind of like Mr. Clean and swept up a lot of unwanted gunk.

Here’s another biobutanol advantage for the financially inclined. Ethanol makers are trapped between the Scylla and Charybdis of corn prices and gasoline prices. Biobutanol can take multiple feedstocks (corn, stover, sugar cane) and critically can sell its output as either a gasoline additive or as a chemical feedstock to make things like plastic bottles.

Here’s the catch. Stop me if you’ve heard this before. No one has built a biobutanol biorefinery at a commercial scale. Yet. The Gevo demonstration-scale plant in Missouri has an annual capacity of about 1 million gallons. So nobody knows if this is economic at scale.

Sound like the cellulosic ethanol industry? You bet. Iogen Energy is partnering with Royal Dutch Shell on a demonstration scale cellulosic ethanol plant that sells its output at a single station in Ottawa, Canada. The plant produces about 40,000 liters a month—or 126,000 gallons a year. (By way of comparison, Canada drank 30.2 million gallons of gasoline every day last year. The U.S. guzzled 377.6 million gallons daily.)

Others are building – or contemplating building – industrial scale facilities, including the likes of Verenium, Range Fuels and Mascoma.

When it comes to advanced biofuels, there just isn’t much scale out there. The only guys with any scale? The ethanol industry.