In August last year when the Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, announced a $1.576 billion funding package over eight-years to promote alternative fuels in particular ethanol I received an email from Ray Wilson with the comment that:
“Ethanol is not a good fuel because a standard petrol engine needs to be extensively modified to use 100% ethanol as it has only half the energy density of petrol.
However, just as one can produce petrol and diesel from coal using the Fischer-Tropsch process, one can use cellulosic (Wood, leaves, grass, grains, etc) matter too to make petrol and diesel by this method. This can be done profitably and the process is well-known…
“The Fischer-Tropsch process is normally used to convert coal to fuels, but it works equally well with cellulosic matter as a feedstock.
So instead of just using the sugar cane juice to make ethanol and discarding the residue, one can convert the entire plant into diesel and petrol and discard very little. Any plant material will do too.
The subsides are available for anyone who wants to proceed with this R&D and the project itself, provided one has the collateral to cover 50% of the Federal loan. I do not have this, so it is very difficult for me to do anything myself. I actually looked into this in some detail recently.
Plant oils are suitable for use as a diesel fuel, but the rest of the plant is discarded as waste. For example, oil-palm nuts are crushed to yield their oil, but the pulp is discarded. Not very efficient.” [end of quote]
Today I received another email from Ray Wilson, this time with comment, “the Germans are using FT [Fischer-Tropsch process] to produce diesel from wood commercially; precisely what I was trying to get going here in Queensland.”
You can read about it at Times Online:
“Ken Fisher, vice-president for strategy at Shell, expects full-scale production on a commercial basis by the middle of the next decade.
“We would like to be the leading provider of second-generation biofuels,” Mr Fisher said. …
All the technologies are based on the Fischer-Tropsch process, invented in Germany in the 1930s to synthesise liquid fuels from coal. The process was initially uneconomic, but was used in Nazi Germany and in South Africa under apartheid when the country lacked access to crude oil.
“The discovery of better catalysts and the rising price of crude is improving the commercial equation…
“Shell has a second BTL [biomass to liquids] investment in Iogen, a Canadian company that this week secured an $80 million (£41 million) grant from the US Government to build a plant in Idaho, which will produce cellulosic ethanol from plant waste and straw. [end of quote]
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD has worked in industry and government. She is currently researching a novel technique for long-range weather forecasting funded by the B. Macfie Family Foundation.