Green biologics awarded £560,000 for green fuel development

Development funding

Green Biologics Ltd has been awarded £250,000 funding from the UK Department of Trade £310,000 from private investors and business angels to develop a next-generation biofuel, biobutanol.

The company says its method will cut the cost of production by up to a third. Biobutanol is currently used in chemical production but high manufacturing costs have prevented it from being widely used as a fuel.

Edward Green, founder and CEO said biofuels, such as biobutanol, are sustainable and environmentally friendly fuels that can be added to, and could ultimately replace, fossil fuels.

“Although butanol is not currently used as a biofuel, it has a number of properties that make it extremely attractive. It is a renewable liquid fuel, produced from the fermentation of sugars, which can easily be integrated into the existing fuel infrastructure by blending with petrol. Unlike bioethanol, it offers similar energy per litre to petrol, has low vapour pressure and is easy to store, handle and transport via pipelines.”

Biobutanol is produced by the fermentation of starch and sugars by Clostridium bacteria, a process first commercialised in 1916 to produce acetone for munitions during the First World War.

The oil company BP recently announced a collaboration with the chemicals manufacturer Dupont and the UK sugar beet processor, British Sugar to manufacture biobutanol using conventional technology in the UK. BP provides a route for butanol into the transport fuel market, and aims to blend butanol with petrol at its 1,200 filling stations.

Within the UK, the Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation will, from April 2008, require fuel suppliers to ensure that an increasing percentage of fuel sales are made up of biofuels by 2020. The UK government says biobutanol will count as a renewable transport fuel under the RTFO.

In addition, use of biobutanol should help the UK meet the EU’s suggestion that biofuels should account for 5.75 per cent of total fuel sales by 2010 and 10 per cent of total fuel sales by 2020.

Green Biologics aims to develop an advanced fermentation process that will increase productivity and lower production costs for biobutanol.

"The major barrier to butanol production has been the high cost of the conventional starch fermentation process,” said Green. The company’s expertise in microbial strain development, together improvement in process technology and the use of non-edible food stocks, should lead to a step change in the economic viability of the manufacturing process. “We are aiming for a two to three fold reduction in cost,” said Green.

“We are effectively using our knowledge of enzymology, microbial physiology and fermentation to optimise and ‘re-commercialise’ the butanol fermentation process."