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The question of whether valuable food-producing farmland should be used to grow fuel crops threatens to put the brakes on farmed fuel sources. A new project undertaken by CSIRO, the Centre for Green Chemistry at Monash University and a group of private investors looks to have opened the door to a new era of bio-fuels that are derived not from food crops, but organic waste.
“At the moment we have demonstrated in the laboratory that basically taking a waste, plant-derived material, which we either call biomass or ligno-cellulose, and that can encompass anything from waste paper, which of course is made from woodchips, to sawdust, municipal green waste, crop residues of one sort and another, and to take that material and to use a new process that we’ve developed to capture about a third of the energy that’s locked up in that material and to concentrate it as a liquid,” says Dr Warwick Raverty, Senior Principal Research Scientist, CSIRO Forest Biosciences.
“One of the important things about Furafuel is that, firstly, it doesn’t make ethanol,” Dr Raverty says.
“What it does make is compatible with ethanol and will allow more ethanol to be mixed with gasoline. There have been extensive studies carried out, not by ourselves but by the Department of Energy in the United States, which shows you can make a fuel which is 2/3 renewable – in other words it’s got one third bio-ethanol and one third of the furans which come out of the Furafuel process and one third petrol, so it’s 67 per cent renewable.”
“Where we are is we’ve proven the concept in the laboratory,” Dr Ravert says.
“We still probably have to do 12 to 18 months more work to basically optimise the conditions so we can get the yields of this liquid up to a commercial level and then we’ll be probably be raising money to build a small pilot plant somewhere to prove the process on a larger scale.”
If proven viable on a broad scale, Furafuel could also be of great benefit to agriculture, through the production of a useful by-product.
“The process can produce a second product which is basically a form of charcoal called agrichar,” Dr Raverty says.
“Agrichar has been used for thousands of years in South America by native peoples to improve the fertility of the soil and we know from archaeological studies that the half-life of this material in the soil is many centuries.
“So this is a very cost-effective potential way of locking up the carbon in the soil while improving the productivity of the land. So I can see the time where farmers will then be paid to plough it into their soils.
“So what that will mean is a radical change I think, in the way agriculture is carried on.
“It will mean more jobs in the bush. It will mean agriculture will become a lot more sustainable so instead of just growing food we’ll be growing a mixture of food crops and energy crops with farmers getting a much higher return per acre than they are at the moment.”
“At the moment we have demonstrated in the laboratory that basically taking a waste, plant-derived material, which we either call biomass or ligno-cellulose, and that can encompass anything from waste paper, which of course is made from woodchips, to sawdust, municipal green waste, crop residues of one sort and another, and to take that material and to use a new process that we’ve developed to capture about a third of the energy that’s locked up in that material and to concentrate it as a liquid,” says Dr Warwick Raverty, Senior Principal Research Scientist, CSIRO Forest Biosciences.
“One of the important things about Furafuel is that, firstly, it doesn’t make ethanol,” Dr Raverty says.
“What it does make is compatible with ethanol and will allow more ethanol to be mixed with gasoline. There have been extensive studies carried out, not by ourselves but by the Department of Energy in the United States, which shows you can make a fuel which is 2/3 renewable – in other words it’s got one third bio-ethanol and one third of the furans which come out of the Furafuel process and one third petrol, so it’s 67 per cent renewable.”
“Where we are is we’ve proven the concept in the laboratory,” Dr Ravert says.
“We still probably have to do 12 to 18 months more work to basically optimise the conditions so we can get the yields of this liquid up to a commercial level and then we’ll be probably be raising money to build a small pilot plant somewhere to prove the process on a larger scale.”
If proven viable on a broad scale, Furafuel could also be of great benefit to agriculture, through the production of a useful by-product.
“The process can produce a second product which is basically a form of charcoal called agrichar,” Dr Raverty says.
“Agrichar has been used for thousands of years in South America by native peoples to improve the fertility of the soil and we know from archaeological studies that the half-life of this material in the soil is many centuries.
“So this is a very cost-effective potential way of locking up the carbon in the soil while improving the productivity of the land. So I can see the time where farmers will then be paid to plough it into their soils.
“So what that will mean is a radical change I think, in the way agriculture is carried on.
“It will mean more jobs in the bush. It will mean agriculture will become a lot more sustainable so instead of just growing food we’ll be growing a mixture of food crops and energy crops with farmers getting a much higher return per acre than they are at the moment.”
