Energy advance at Nelson

Press, 3 October 1979, Page 4

Energy advance at Nelson

Nelson Reporter The Minister of Energy (Mr Birch) in a flying visit to the Cawthron Institute has been made well aware of the institute's work in the successful investigation of a linked-fer-mentation process which produces in one proces> ethanol and methane from wood and crop sugars. The institute is only one of three organisations — Auckland University and Lincoln College are the others — to have competed a contract involving this study. A report on the “bio-mass for energy" proposal will soon be put forward by a working party of the Energy Research Development Committee. The Minister's visit — lasting a little more than 25 minutes — gave its director (Dr R. H. Thornton> barely sufficient time to explain the project and its successful outcome. Mr Birch was told that much

of the work done by the institute was without Government funding, and that there appeared to be little communication among those working on related projects. The process, successfully completed by the institute, may be a world first. Certainly Dr Thornton knows of no literature published on the laboratory method which the Cawthron team used. The institute investigated the production of both alcohol and methane by a linked and continuous fermentation of crops (such as sugar beet) and/or wood sugars. Each of these processes, singly, are well known and longestablished. The linking of them is hitherto unknown. What the institute set out to do was to produce ethanol as a liquid fuel from fodder beet, then process the residues of the beet to produce methane (natural gas)