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Top Ethanol Producer And Iowa State University Team On Ethanol Starch Research
By Mr Ethanol | February 22, 2008
San Jose Mercury News:
The nation’s top ethanol producer is teaming with an Iowa State University researcher in hopes of squeezing more ethanol out of a kernel of corn.
Sioux Falls-based Poet LLC already uses a process called BPX, which converts starch to sugar and then ferments it to ethanol without the use of heat or cooking. Poet uses the method in 20 of its 22 ethanol plants and estimates it can get 3 gallons of ethanol from each bushel of corn compared with an industry standard of 2.7 gallons per bushel.
Poet is working with Jay-lin Jane, a carbohydrate chemist and professor in Iowa State’s food science and human nutrition department, to look at differences between starches in various varieties of corn.
The goal is to identify which lines of corn starches are more easily broken down into glucose by the enzyme used for conversion. The glucose is then fermented into ethanol and carbon dioxide.
“When starch is in the corn plant, it’s sometimes difficult to break down,” said Mark Stowers, Poet’s vice president of research and development. “So what we’re trying to understand is how the starch is structured in various corn plants so that we can do a better job and more efficiently break the starch down into the sugars for the ethanol process.”
Jane said some starches are loosely packed in the granule and can be easily broken into glucose. Others, especially those with different crystalline structures, prove much more difficult. Continue reading…
Topics: Ethanol, News, Research, Science |
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