Research carried out at TU Delft has brought the efficient production of bioethanol considerably closer. The work by Marko Kuyper (a scientist from Delft) has been particularly important, ensuring that the fermenting of certain sugars (from agricultural waste) into ethanol has improved considerably over the last few years. He received his doctorate on 6 June based on this subject.
Alternatives for the current oil-based fuels are steadily receiving more attention throughout the world. One of the alternatives is bioethanol, i.e. alcohol produced from agricultural crops.
Bioethanol is currently only made from the sugars in corn, sugar beet, grain and sugar cane, using bakers' yeast. Cultivating these crops results in huge amounts of by-products such as straw and corn leaves. It would be beneficial to use these residual materials, which also include lots of sugars, to produce bioethanol. Agricultural land could then be used far more efficiently and, at the same time, competition with food supplies could be prevented.
Until recently, the problem was that the complex mixture of sugars held by these residual materials could not be converted into ethanol efficiently using the traditional bakers' yeast. However, TU Delft has recently discovered a solution to this problem, by genetically modifying the bakers' yeast. The scientists in Delft have built in a gene (derived from a mould that was found in elephant manure by the Radboud University in Nijmegen) so that one particularly important type of sugar, xylose, can now be converted into ethanol, thus making it possible to produce bioethanol from residual wastes.
Drs. Marko Kuyper has greatly improved this method during his doctorate research over the past few years, so that researchers can now start working on the next step: producing bioethanol on an industrial scale from sugar-retaining agricultural waste. Within the Kluyver Centre for Genomics of Industrial Fermentation, the TU Delft is working together with Royal Nedalco and BIRD Engineering. These stakeholders expect to see large-scale industrial implementation within the next five years.
Further information is available from:
Marko Kuyper, tel. 003115 278 9490, e-mail: s.m.kuyper@tnw.tudelft.nl
Taken from TNW Today, number 9 |
