Machinery Minute: Turn Your Farm into an Ethanol Plant

Chemical engineers at Purdue University have come-up with a plan that could turn just about any farm into an ethanol plant, of sorts. They developed a new method to process agricultural waste, like corn stover, of which there is no shortage in the Midwest. They're proposing the creation of mobile processing plants that would rove the Midwest to produce the fuels. According to Purdue, the approach sidesteps a fundamental economic hurdle in biofuels -- the expense associated with transporting biomass. Their concept is to process biomass into liquid fuel with a mobile platform and then take this fuel to a central refinery for further processing before using it in internal combustion engines. The new method, nicknamed h2bio-oil, works by adding hydrogen into the biomass-processing reactor. The hydrogen for the mobile plants would be derived from natural gas or the biomass itself. The method has been studied extensively through modeling, and experiments are under way at Purdue to validate the concept. To learn more, visit www.AgDay.com.

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• Ethanol
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• Purdue
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• Biomass
• Hydrogen