- 10 April 2007 -

Renewable launch for B&V

Black & Veatch has launched Clean Energy Technologies LLC (CET) to help increase needed supplies of ethanol and other renewable fuels through an early stage biogasification technology concept.

The new CET Process, originally proposed by US-based Pearson Technologies for use in renewable fuel production, will be engineered, designed and constructed by Black & Veatch and later CET will license the technology to others for development, engineering and construction.

Unlike conventional fermentation processes which are dependent upon grains or other costly feedstocks, the CET Process uses abundant carbonaceous materials, such as corn stover, switchgrass, wood waste and other types of biomass and plant waste materials, to produce a syngas that is catalytically converted to ethanol or other higher value products, B&V says.

In the CET Process, carbonaceous materials are rapidly heated in the presence of steam and absence of oxygen to produce a synthesis gas (or syngas) composed primarily of carbon monoxide and hydrogen. The resulting syngas is then passed through special catalysts to produce the desired product such as ethanol, methanol, synthetic diesel, aviation, or other fuels, as well as chemicals such as hydrogen and ammonia.

Researchers at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center report the results of a six-year experiment in which doubling the atmospheric greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) in a scrub oak ecosystem caused a reduction in carbon storage in the soil. The scientists said these findings add a new perspective on the capacity of Earth's soils to store carbon, and suggest that elevated CO2, by altering microbial communities, may turn the soil from a potential carbon sink into a carbon source. This could offset some of the gains in carbon storage in plant biomass due to increased growth at elevated CO2. "We were surprised to find that these soils were losing soil carbon despite the fact that there was more plant growth," said Patrick Megonigal, a microbial ecologist at SERC and one of the study's authors. "We thought that higher plant growth at elevated CO2 would either add more carbon to soils, or at least leave it the same. We now need to consider a third possibility-the carbon already in soils will end up back in the atmosphere as a greenhouse gas."

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