PETROL FROM CORN

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 10, Issue 92, 10 February 1947, Page 5

PETROL FROM CORN

U.S. EXPERIMENTS FAR ADVANCED The -production of synthetic liquid motor fuels from corncobs and other farm wastes has moved a step forward with the opening of a new plant at the United States Department of Agriculture’s northern regional research laboratory. Dr. L. B. Howard, chief of the Bureau of Agriculture and Industrial Chemistry, announced that operations designed to process enough material for a daily output of 500 gallons had been started in the new unit.

The function of the newly constructed building is to produce fermentable sugars from which liquid fuels can be obtained. The farm leftovers pass through a series of coils, vats and machines in what is known as a “saccharification process.” In the case of corncobs, it goes like this: The cobs are crushed and fed into a long cylinder, where the particles are forced through an acid bath to extract the sugars. This yields a 15 per cent, sugar solution. The particles then are dried, ground put through an acid spray, a screw press, a high speed mixer, a steam-heated coil and a filter. The result is a clear solution containing about 10 per cent, glucose sugar. The solution then goes to a pilot plant to be fermented to alcohol butanol, and acetone. The research is aimed at ascertaining how much of this liquid fuel material can be derived from the various kinds of agricultural surpluses, computing the costs of such processes, and determining the feasibility of production on a commercial scale.