Nikkei. Petroleum and petrochemical company Idemitsu Kosan and Japan’s Research Institute of Innovative Technology for the Earth (RITE) recently formed a joint research team to develop a way to mass-produce cellulosic biobutanol.
The partners aim to build a test plant around 2013 and begin full-on production around 2020.
The process for making biobutanol starts with rice straw, corn stalks and other inedible vegetable matter, which is converted into sugar and placed in a fermenting vat with bacteria genetically engineered by RITE. The bacteria turn the sugar into biobutanol. Idemitsu and RITE aim to develop a process for making 300 liters of the fuel from every ton of vegetable matter.
The partners reckon that mass production will lower the price of biobutanol to about 30-40 yen a liter, about the same as ethanol, making it an affordable alternative to gas and petrochemicals. They will consider building a company out of the research team.
RITE has been collaborating with Honda on the production of cellulosic ethanol and also biobutanol since 2006. (Earlier post.)
Resources
M. Inui, M. Suda, S. Kimura, K. Yasuda, H. Suzuki, H. Toda, S. Yamamoto, S. Okino, N. Suzuki and H. Yukawa (2008) Expression of Clostridium acetobutylicum butanol synthetic genes in Escherichia coli. Appl. Microbiol. Biotechnol. 77: 1305-1316 doi: 10.1007/s00253-007-1257-5