Cellulosic Ethanol Progress

This report appears promising inasmuch as progress is been proclaimed. Numbers and actual comparables are not mentioned and bragged about which makes me a little shy. The important thing to observe is that the feedstocks are clearly spelled out and a n8umber of organizations are working diligently including this one.

There is one brass ring and a lot of folks are jumping to get it now. We have posted on several cellulosic protocols and also on at least one lignin protocol. It both can be made to perform efficiently at a modest temperature then we are really in business.

I have also expressed my share of skepticism over a viable solution been achieved anytime soon. This stems from the simple observation that mother nature engineered a product able to stand up to normal and also abnormal biological attack and we must not think she is about to give us a break.

The result of this is that we are certainly seeing incremental progress, but never quite enough and plenty of optimistic press releases to help keep the money flowing. Perhaps that has to be good enough. It is the type of science that responds well to slow mastery. For the impatient types recall that most chemical and biologically based processes take literally decades to be implemented without the luxury of rapid finance.

That seems inefficient, but it is not. Any process that sort of works in the lab, will hand you a fist full of surprises upon your efforts to transition to plant scale equipment. Changing World Technologies is obviously learning that after running a solid pilot plat operation. They are using high temperature high pressure vessels to reform feedstock into hydrocarbons.

A perfectly good plan so far as it goes, but I can think of few systems that would be more inclined to be as troublesome. It may in fact be a fine piece of application engineering, but the vagarities of this form of research makes me very hesitant to bet any money.

I would like to see the strands of research drawn together to see if a plausible system is available yet. Some are claiming this, but a colloquium would be highly appropriate now.


Qteros: Cellulosic Ethanol Production Breakthrough

July 27th, 2009

Posted by Joanna Schroeder

http://domesticfuel.com/2009/07/27/qteros-cellulosic-ethanol-production-breakthrough/

Qteros, formerly Sun Ethanol, recently announced that it has broken the barrier of ethanol production from cellulosic biomass feedstocks such as corn stover, sugarcane and woody biomass. As most biofuels companies report the production of 50 grams of ethanol per liter, Qteros says it is now producing 70 grams of ethanol per liter or approximately 100 gallons per ton.

The company’s proprietary microbe, the Q Microbe is reported to achieve this breakthrough production number. It is achieved through one step on industrially pretreated cellulosic biomass feedstocks, such as woody biomass. This technology makes cellulosic ethanol production the most economical to date and it uses less water than current ethanol production.

During a presentation at the World Congress on Industrial Biotechnolgy and Bioprocesssing last week in Montreal, Canada, Susan Leschine a microbiologist at the University of Massachusetts said of the discovery, “We knew from the beginning that the Q Microbe was an extraordinary microorganism. These results confirm what we predicted: Qteros and the Q Microbe can make cellulosic ethanol a commercial reality.”

Jef Sharp, Executive VP was quoted in a USA Today article about the breakthrough, “According to a DOE report, there are over a billion tons of plant biomass available every year for this purpose. Qteros will not need fossil fuel inputs for fertilizer or distillation of the ethanol because the lignin portion of the plant material (about 1/3 of most plants) will be burned to generate the heat necessary to refine the ethanol. There will also be leftover green electricity created.”

Although this announcement is monumental by past comparisons, Qteros has only just begun. The company expects to make additional improvements to the process of taking advantage of ongoing efforts in molecular genetics and strain development. That’s a whole lost of science to say that the company is still in search of producing an even better biofuel.

Cob Collection Trials Successful

– July 27th, 2009

It’s harvest time somewhere and it’s in Texas. Today, the first cob collection of 2009 is complete and POET is continuing to work with agricultural equipment manufacturers and growers to discover the most efficient and affordable means for harvesting cellulosic feedstock.

July 6-22, equipment for harvesting corn cobs was tested near Harlingen, Texas. The trials were in anticipation for larger harvesting efforts that will be underway this fall in the Midwest. In all, POET expects to harvest as many as 25,000 acres in Texas, South Dakota and Iowa.

POET has been using corn cobs in its pilot cellulosic ethanol plant in Scotland, S.D. and will they will also be used at its first commercial cellulosic ethanol plant in Emmetsburg, Iowa in 2011. The project is known as Project LIBERTY and will produce 25 million gallons of cellulosic ethanol per year.

“Agriculture equipment manufacturers are putting the final touches on a variety of harvesters that will be on the market soon,” said Scott Weishaar, Vice President of Commercial Development. “Farmers will have a lot of ways to take advantage of corn cobs as a new revenue stream.”

POET will continue work with 15-20 farmers in the Emmetsburg area in further tests this fall and will purchase cobs for use in Project LIBERTY.

“Farmers will play a big role in our nation’s energy future,” Weishaar said. “Their support has been instrumental in the success of grain-based ethanol and will continue to be crucial in commercializing cellulosic ethanol.”

Maize Antiquity

This work pretty well locks down the antiquity of maize husbandry. You have the natural heartland and direct evidence. It may and should be older still, but not by a lot. This age compares favorably with all other global domesticates that arose worldwide at much the same time. In other words, we were expecting this to show up at this remove in time.

An observation of course that begs the question of how was the idea of agricultural manipulation communicated globally about 8,000 to 9,000 years ago, if at all? I address the issue in my manuscript and generate some ideas and prospective conclusions.

It would be helpful if seamanship was even earlier than currently indicated. That is actually not a bad proposition. Coastal fishing in dug out canoes even would generate accidental travelers with the necessary skills to stay alive but no capacity to return. And you are not transporting seed so much as the idea that plant breeding can produce surprising results.

Certainly, that prospect was richly developed in the Americas and the actual transfer may have been just that minimal.
The emergence of maize is becoming well understood, unlikely as that may seem. It still is amazing that we ended up with a corn cob with a protective sleeve that dried perfectly.

Maize was domesticated from its wild ancestor more than 8700 years according to biological evidence uncovered by researchers in the Mexico’s Central Balsas River Valley. This is the earliest dated evidence -- by 1200 years -- for the presence and use of domesticated maize.

http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/550327/

Newswise — Maize was domesticated from its wild ancestor more than 8700 years according to biological evidence uncovered by researchers in the Mexico’s Central Balsas River Valley. This is the earliest dated evidence -- by 1200 years -- for the presence and use of domesticated maize.

The researchers, led by Anthony Ranere of Temple University and Dolores Piperno of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, reported their findings in two studies -- “The Cultural and chronological context of early Holocene maize and squash domestication in the Central Balsas River Valley, Mexcio” and “Starch grain and phytolith evidence for early ninth millennium B.P. maize from the Central Balsas River Valley, Mexico” -- being published in the PNAS Early Edition, March 24.

According to Ranere, recent studies have confirmed that maize derived from teosinte, a large wild grass that has five species growing in Mexico, Guatemala and Nicaragua. The teosinte species that is closest to maize is Balsas teosinte, which is native to Mexico’s Central Balsas River Valley.

“We went to the area where the closest relative to maize grows, looked for the earliest maize and found it,” said Ranere. “That wasn’t surprising since molecular biologists had determined that Balsas teosinte was the ancestral species to maize. So it made sense that this was where we would find the earliest domestication of maize.”

The study began with Piperno, a Temple University anthropology alumna, finding evidence in the form of pollen and charcoal in lake sediments that forests were being cut down and burned in the Central Balsas River Valley to create agricultural plots by 7000 years ago. She also found maize and squash phytoliths -- rigid microscopic bodies found in many plants -- in lakeside sediments.

Ranere, an archaeologist, joined in the study to find rock shelters or caves where people lived in that region thousands of years ago. His team carried out excavations in four of the 15 caves and rock shelters visited in the region, but only one of them yielded evidence for the early domestication of maize and squash.

Ranere excavated the site and recovered numerous grinding tools. Radiocarbon dating showed that the tools dated back at least 8700 years. Although grinding tools were found beneath the 8700 year level, the researchers were not able to obtain a radiocarbon date for the earliest deposits. Previously, the earliest evidence for the cultivation of maize came from Ranere and Piperno’s earlier research in Panama where maize starch and phytoliths dated back 7600 years.

Ranere said that maize starch, which is different from teosinte starch, was found in crevices of many of the tools that were unearthed.

“We found maize starch in almost every tool that we analyzed, all the way down to the bottom of our site excavations,” Ranere said. “We also found phytoliths that comes from maize or corn cobs, and since teosinte doesn’t have cobs, we knew we had something that had changed from its wild form.”

Ranere said that their findings also supported the premise that maize was domesticated in a lowland seasonal forest context, as opposed to being domesticated in the arid highlands as many researchers had once believed.

“For a long time, I though it strange that researchers argued about the location and age of maize domestication yet never looked in the Central Balsas River Valley, the homeland for the wild ancestor,” said Ranere. “Dolores was the first one to do it.’

In addition to Ranere and Piperno, other researchers in the study included Irene Holst of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Ruth Dickau of Temple, and Jose Iriarte of the University of Exeter. The study was funded by the National Science Foundation, National Geographic Society, Wenner-Gren Foundation, Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and the Temple University College of Liberal Arts.