Biofuel Breakthrough Powered by the Sun

It's tempting to review the following high points and walk away thinking that it sounds too good to be true: a biomass-to-fuel pilot project that relies not on foodstuffs such as corn, but on corn's fibrous byproducts such as the stalks, and even wood chips are suitable for the process; even as a small pilot project, before economies of scale kick in, it is producing fuel at a cost-competitive $2 per gallon; and to cap it off, it's the power of the sun that makes the whole thing go.

As reported by Portfolio.com, a Louisville, Colorado company may well be on the way to the implementation of a major breakthrough in the production of biofuels, one that is more efficient, solar powered, cost-effective, and just raring to be scaled up to an operation capable of producing several million gallons of fuel annually.

The Sundrop Fuels trial-scale facility is situated halfway between Denver and Boulder in the town of Broomfield. The facility's design incorporates a primary reliance on solar energy to drive the biomass to fuel generation. Also in play is a process that looks beyond diverting food into biofuel creation to the use of more fibrous raw material. These factors position the Sundrop approach as a potential game-changer in the rapidly growing biofuels sub-sector of the burgeoning green energy field.

The technological innovations arise from years of research performed by scientists at Colorado University, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and the Los Alamos National Laboratory where research teams have trained their efforts on using the sun to transform organic molecules.

An array of mirrors powers the process by heating the raw material input to a temperature of 2,200 to 2,400 degrees Fahrenheit. These temperatures are way above those of current conventional biofuel generation plants which operate at about 900 degrees. Owing to the extreme heat the process generates, Sundrop's process is capable of almost instantaneously driving chemical changes and in a wider variety of materials than those that conventional biomass-to-fuel plants are able to process. And by using solar power, Sundrop has removed one of the major operating cost obstacles —  that of high energy inputs — in the development of their innovative approach.

The resulting products are a chemical match to diesel and gasoline, and are all set for transport and use without any change to equipment or infrastructure in order to put them to use. Sundrop's next mission is to start praying for rain, speaking metaphorically and financially. Having set a goal to raise between $100 million and $150 million, Sundrop has its sights set on building a much larger plant with a full operating capacity several times that of the successful and promising pilot project. Company officials believe that with support to get things moving, this technology could be expanded to produce 100 million carbon-neutral gallons of fuel annually.

Photo courtesy of hlkljgk via flickr