[Peakoil] Butanol as substitute?

[Michael Skeggs mike@bystander.net]

Maybe, but butanol smells *bad*.
Like rotting garbage. The anti-whaling protestors' stink bombs they
throw at the whaling ships are butanoic acid (oxidised butanol), and a
common prank among chem students is to place a drop on somebody's lab
coat, so they stink for days.
Regards,
Michael Skeggs

On 3 March 2011 21:44, Jenny Goldie <jenny.goldie at optusnet.com.au> wrote:
>
> Butanol as Gasoline Substitute from Bacteria
> Butanol may be used as a fuel in an internal combustion engine. Because its
> longer hydrocarbon chain causes it to be fairly non-polar, it is more
> similar to gasoline than it is to ethanol. Butanol has been demonstrated to
> work in vehicles designed for use with gasoline without modification.
> University of California, Berkeley, chemists have engineered bacteria to
> churn out a gasoline-like biofuel (butanol) at about 10 times the rate of
> competing microbes, a breakthrough that could soon provide an affordable
> transportation fuel. The potential feedstocks are the same as for ethanol:
> energy crops such as sugar beets, sugar cane, corn grain, wheat and cassava,
> prospective non-food energy crops such as switchgrass and even guayule in
> North America, as well as agricultural byproducts such as straw and corn
> stalks.
> http://www.enn.com/business/article/42416
>
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