Sustainable Biobutanol and Working towards the Green Gasoline of the Future

Copyright: © 2012 Dahman Y. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. With world energy consumption predicted to increase 54% between 2001 and 2025, primary attention has been directed towards the development of carbon neutral energy and sustainable sources to meet the future needs [1]. Reductions of fossil fuels, environmental deterioration, and fluctuating prices of traditional fuels have revived an interest in the development of renewable fuels. Concerns regarding green house gas emission, energy scarcity and the desire for energy independence are increasing the pace and intensity of biofuel research and commercialization. Biofuels are an attractive substitute to current petroleum based fuels because they can be utilized as transportation fuels with diminutive change to current technologies; they also have significant potential to improve sustainability and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Liquid (i.e., ethanol, butanol, biodiesel) or gaseous (i.e., methane or hydrogen) biofuels are generally produced from organic materials such as starch, oilseeds and animal fats or cellulose and agricultural biomass. While in some countries such as South Africa and Russia, ABE fermentation process remained competitive due to the low raw material and labor costs, it had lost competitiveness in other countries by 1960s, owing to the increase of feedstock costs and advancement of the petrochemical industry [2]. Since the late 1990s global biofuel research has steadily been on the rise, with new modified micro-organisms, pretreatments, process configurations and technologies, thereby improving conversion efficiencies and decreasing production cost. In first-generation biofuel, plant sugars and starch from food crops were fermented to biofuel by yeast. The advent of second-generation biofuels broadened the feedstock base to include non-food cellulosic biomass by incorporating chemical or enzymatic hydrolysis in various process configurations [3]. Third-generation biofuels employed enzyme-producing micro-organisms such as algae, to hydrolyze plant polymers and ferment the resulting sugars. The Canadian government supports the development of biofuel production through a $2 billion commitment in the 2007 Federal Budget. A longstanding federal and provincial excise tax exemption on renewable fuels has encouraged the renewable fuels to be competitive with gasoline. In the United States, according to a report from the Department of Energy (DOE) titled “Roadmap for Biomass Technology in the United States”, bio-based transportation fuels are projected to increase from 0.5% of U.S consumption in 2001 to 4% in 2010, 10% in 2020, and further to 20-30% in 2030, or about 60 billion gallons of gasoline equivalent per year. This is in addition to 10–12 billion pounds of butanol annually required for industrial energy consumption [4].