Scientists at New Orlean’s Tulane University have perfected a new strain of the bacteria Clostridium. Dubbed TU-103, this microbe is the first of its kind that can synthesise butanol from cellulose.
What does this mean for our readers? Well, imagine taking a stack of old newspapers or sugarcane waste and turning into useable bio-fuel for your car. TU-103 can take any type of plant or plant product and turn it into renewable, sustainable butanol.
TU-103 was discovered by David Mullin, an associate professor at Tulane’s Cell and Molecular Biology Department, postdoctoral fellow Harshad Velankar and undergraduate student Hailee Rask over a two-year period. The team is currently testing the microbe on bagasse, a fibrous waste material produced during the harvesting of sugar cane.
Mullin describes his work thusly:
“Cellulose is present everywhere: paper, grass, leaves, corn cobs, corn stalks and renewable agricultural waste products. It is available on a vast scale since things like corn stalks and corn cobs are usually thrown away.”
He continues:
“This discovery could reduce the cost to produce bio-butanol. In addition to possible savings on the price per gallon, as a fuel, bio-butanol produced from cellulose would dramatically reduce carbon dioxide and smog emissions in comparison to gasoline, and have a positive impact on landfill waste.”
Compared to ethanol, butanol is a much better product. It uses the useless by-products from existing crop production, rather than needing crops to be grown specifically for use as fuel. It has virtually the same energy content as petrol / gasoline albeit with less CO2 and other harmful emissions. It’s a message echoed Jeffrey Sigler, professor of practice in Tulane University’s Earth and Environmental Sciences Department:
“Biofuels [like butanol] in general are better for air quality than gasoline. They burn cleaner. If agricultural waste products are being used as the feedstock in this case, it seems to me that this could be an important step toward reducing net CO2 emissions from these types of fuels, as well as minimizing land use impacts.”
Better still, butanol requires no special modifications to existing internal combustion engines to work as an automotive fuel. Unsurprisingly, Mullin has great hopes for TU-103 and the butanol as a future fuel:
“I really would like to see this process developed into something at a larger scale that people could utilize. I’m not really equipped to do that here, but if there was an industrial partner that had the capability to produce butanol on a large scale, it would give me some pleasure knowing that our research efforts in some way contributed to reducing the energy dependency of the United States on foreign oil.”
Is butanol too good to be true? I don’t have the scientific background to say so, but from the results Mullin and his team have been getting, it seems that both it – and the TU-103 microbe – could become a key part in our clean(er) energy future.
By Tristan Hankins
Story sources: The Hullabaloo & Wired
