A tiger in your (septic) tank
Ethanol's viability as mass-scale motor fuel depends on plentiful availability. This joint venture turns poo into paydirtUS biofuels specialist Qteros and Israeli recycling technologist Applied CleanTech have started work on a joint project to extract automotive ethanol from what they politely refer to as 'municipal wastewater solids', aka sewage sludge.
Sewage is a rich source of plant-sourced cellulosic material which, when fermented, produces ethyl and methyl alcohol. ACT has spent years working out how to extract and concentrate this material from sludge by removing moisture and other matter extraneous to fermentation. The result of their efforts is a substance they've branded Recyllose.
Converting biomass like Recyllose is a complex business, first entailing a pretreatment involving enzymatic hydrolysis (this amounts to the breaking open of water molecules) followed by fermentation. Qteros has come up with a means of consolidating it all into a single production process.
This simplification will allow ethanol processing plants to function profitably on a much smaller scale than has been the case to date, making ethanol production more viable and therefore more attractive to entrepreneurs and public sector alike.
"Our customer is every municipality that has a wastewater treatment plant," Qteros co-founder and senior project manager Jeff Hausthor told media in a statement. "It will provide a value-added product for municipal waste water plants, thereby making treatment plants much less expensive to run and helping local governments throughout the world with their constrained budgets."
The significance of such technologies helps overcome a major bugbear in the use of ethanol as fuel an energy density deficit of about 40 per cent alongside petrol. That means it takes about 1.67 litres of ethanol to do the same job as one litre of petrol. Which in turn means ethanol's viability as food for cars depends on industry's finding ways to extract it from everywhere it can.
This is the raison d'être of outfits like Qteros and ACT. In July, Qteros demonstrated a single step process efficient enough to yield 70g/litre ethanol from an industrially pre-treated biomass like Recyllose. The viability threshold for commercial production of cellulosic ethanol is generally put at around 50g/litre.
Image: Cellulosic material - Qteros
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