New Processing Steps Promise More Economical Ethanol Production

Why isn’t ethanol production growing by leaps and bounds in the face of higher gasoline prices? Ethanol production from cornstarch is a $10 billion dollar business in the United States and 4 billion gallons of ethanol will be produced in 2006. In his 2006 State of the Union address, President Bush called for doubling ethanol production by 2012, and replacing 75 percent of Middle Eastern oil with bioethanol from renewable materials by 2025.

“We have the technical ability, but making ethanol production economical is the problem,” said Y.H. Percival Zhang, assistant professor of biological systems engineering in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Virginia Tech.

Zhang has developed a more cost effective pretreatment process that he will report on at the 231st American Chemical Society National Meeting in Atlanta March 26-30.

Ethanol now comes from corn kernels. “But that is food,” Zhang said. “If we want to produce 30 to 60 billion gallons of ethanol, which is what is needed to meet the President’s goal, we have to use the entire plant, or the stover (leaves, stalks, and cobs), and leave the kernels as food.” The largest challenge for bioconversion from raw materials to bioethanol is high processing costs, resulting in higher prices for bioethanol than for gasoline.

Science Daily