By Greg Johnson, Contributor It's been four years since David Ramey fueled up his unmodified 1992 Buick Park Avenue with butanol derived from biomass and made a 10,000-mile road trip that took him from Blacklick, Ohio to San Diego and back. The trip, which included stops along the way to court members of the media and environmental agency personnel, was conceived as a way to prove that “biobutanol” had inherent environmental and fuel-economy benefits over its better-known cousin in the green fuels family, ethanol. Flash forward to 2009 and biobutanol still isn't getting the respect that Ramey and other proponents say the fuel deserves. Ramey, for example, continues to make demonstration drives – he'll fuel up a vehicle with biobutanol for the Fourth off July parade in nearby Gahanna, Ohio. “There has been very little funding for biobutanol research over the past 30 years and we are simply in the infancy of this new technology,” Ramey wrote in a recent email to Green Car Advisor . “Many are talking about biobutanol but few are producing it.” That situation is about to change, according to biobutanol backers who describe the fuel as a worthy challenger to ethanol. When properly formulated, they say, butanol burns cleaner than ethanol, has a higher energy density, can be transported in e xisting petroleum-product pipelines and won't hurt seals, gaskets or other parts of internal combustion engines.
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Backers Say It Is Time For BioButanol To Take Its Place in Energy Lineup
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