Better than ethanol (CNNMoney.com) {butanol, ethanol's big brother}

[eppur_se_muova]

By Steve Hargreaves, CNNMoney.com staff writer
April 2 2007: 3:31 PM EDT

Now a partnership between two corporate heavy weights - BP (Charts) and DuPont (Charts) - aims to commercialize Biobutanol, a fuel similar to ethanol but with a few important advantages. The question is: Can they make it cheap enough?

Biobutanol's first advantage: it packs more power. Conventional corn-based ethanol - the kind most widely produced in the United States - is only about 70 percent as efficient as gasoline. This means consumers have to use more of it to drive the same amount of miles.
Green is good

Biobutanol, on the other hand, is nearly as efficient as gasoline, according to Reese Tisdale, a project consultant at the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Emerging Energy Research.

Second, biobutanol doesn't absorb water like ethanol does.

So instead of having to be shipped separately and blended with gasoline closer to the filling station, biobutanol could be added to gasoline right at the refiner and shipped via the same pipeline, and share other infrastructure with petroleum-based fuels.
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more: http://money.cnn.com/2007/04/02/news/economy/biobutanol/index.htm?cnn=yes

YEEESSS!! I've been hoping to see butanol developed as a fuel ever since I learned how easy it was to make by fermentation of starch (it's been done since WWI). Sounds like people are waking up to the advantages. MORE AT THE LINK.

ON EDIT: The interview is at: http://www.technologyreview.com/Energy/18443/