Jay Moynihan, UW-Extension jay.moynihan@ces.uwex.edu
A bioplastic shampoo bottle (FKuR Willich, http://www.fkur.com/ )
How to replace fossil energy feedstock with "biobased" energy feedstocks is one of the big goals of science and industry in this century. But in many ways, biofuel is the tip of the biobased iceberg. Businesswise, plastics and chemistry may be the sectors that transition first.
The enormity of this transition provides a lot of risk and opportunity. Fossil feedstocks (oil, gas, coal) become not only fuel and electricity. They are key to plastics, and industrial chemistry. The research and application of transitioning to bioplastics and "biochemistry" are underway, global and developing quickly.
Fossil feedstock is made of stuff that was once alive. Boil the science down to its essentials, and you get this: Given the right technology/process, anything that is not mineral/rock or metal can be turned into fuels, plastics, and chemistry that functionally mirrors the old fossil sources. That is where the risk and opportunity lie. Developing processes that do what geology did over hundreds of millions of years in a time span that provides a return on investment for doing so.
Anaerobic digesters on dairy farms producing methane used to generate electricity are slowly becoming more common. Wisconsin has about 30. Germany has about 7,000 running on farms, water/sewer treatment facilities, municipal garbage centers, etc. The next stage for this technology is using the methane (also called bio natural gas) to make polymer products in addition to energy. In Oregon and Scandinavia, the processes developed to bleach paper pulp without using chlorine are now being experimentally altered to turn the lignin and other plant chemicals into polymers for plastics manufacturing.
The people that manage to grab the ROI ring will have an interesting century.
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