Bioeconomy Institute

Butanol is the biofuel of choice because it more closely matches automotive fuels than ethanol, however, current impediments to economically converting corn to butanol include: low yield and concentration, slow productivity, inadequate separation technologies, unknown quality attributes of co-products, and unknown costs of retrofitting ethanol plants. The goal of this project is to develop the enabling technologies that will permit the current corn-to-ethanol industry move to butanol biofuel production. This project will focus on developing new recovery technologies, developing enhanced butanol production protocols, identifying micronutrients present and inexpensive sources of missing nutrients, determining the impact of bacterial butanol fermentation on dried grain co-products, and determining the cost of retrofitting for butanol production.