ButylFuel believes bio-butanol may be the best green replacement for gasoline or diesel -- but first, it has to bring the price down.
The Columbus company is using a new strain of bacterium developed by Shang-Tian Yang, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Ohio State University, to turn feedstock into butanol, bypassing the petroleum refining process through which the product is now made.
ButylFuel is currently running a pilot plant in nearby Gahanna to prove its technology and find new ways to make the fuel commercially viable, says Tom Grote, ButylFuel's chief financial officer. Grote, whose family owns
Donatos pizza and
Grote Company, says his family bought ButylFuel because "we're very interested in green initiatives."
Founded by Dave Ramey as Environmental Energy in the early 1990s, the company says butanol has big advantages over ethanol. Ethanol is corrosive and can't be shipped through a pipeline. It must be mixed with gasoline to be used in current engines, while butanol can be used in a blend or by itself. And butanol has about the same energy content as gasoline, while ethanol has only about a third.
But commercially produced butanol, used primarily as an industrial solvent, costs between $3.50 and $7 a gallon using today's production methods. Grote says the company is at least a year a way from building a demonstration plant that would produce a commercial product using cleaner, cheaper processes.
Grote credits Ramey, now the company's chief technology officer, with helping to educate consumers (he showed butanol could be used as a drop-in substitute for gasoline by
filling his '92 Buick with the fuel) and lawmakers, who wrote butanol into the 2007 federal energy bill as part of the nation's renewable fuels standards.
The company, in tandem with Yang, has benefited from
Ohio Third Frontier funding, but "we're aggressively partnering with folks to try to accelerate development," Grote says. "We are definitely willing to take on a strategic partner who would be willing to invest as we grow this."
ButylFuel currently employs six.
Source: Tom Grote, ButylFuel
Writer: Gene Monteith