North+Carolina+Bio-fuels+Center

North Carolina Bio-fuels Center The North Carolina Bio-fuels Center is a massive facility built in place of an old tobacco research building, formerly used to discover cures to blights that afflicted North Carolina's premier cash crop. The North Carolina Bio-fuels Center engages in research into the production of all manner of bio-fuels including ethanol and biodiesel as the premier sources for the state. The facility runs off of a combination of its own revenue and state assisted programs, including the initial sum of five million to lease and renovate the facility in Oxford North Carolina. The Bio-fuel Center features impressive facilities and oversees North Carolina's goal of having 10% of all fuel consumed in North Carolina being a green alternative. The goal itself was created by a state board after it was assessed that nearly the entirety of the NC state budget was spent on fuel, of the money used little to none was being re-circulated into the local economy. The 10% margin was both a calculation of potential sources within NC and also the blend limit of ethanol into conventional gasoline allowed in regular pumps so that car manufacturers will honor the warranty on their vehicles, anything above 10% and the car will lose its dealer warranty, jeopardizing the owner. The primary fuel being researched within the center is ethanol, the primary drawbacks of which include its acidity, water consumption, and difficulty in extraction and financial feasibility of its sources. There are many stocks that can be used in the production of ethanol which is created through the fermentation and transformation of sugars, making it easiest to extract from substances such as sugarcane. The sugars necessary for ethanol can also be obtained by breaking down other plant stuffs, which leads to the research facilities new and probably unexpected source for future ethanol, trees. Trees posses several traits freeing them from ethanol’s major problems, including year round growth capabilities, and the ability to grow on poor land unfit for commercial crops. Lumber has also been harvested for centuries within North Carolina, making a solid case for the industries initial sustainability until the necessary quantities of poor production land have been acquired for the growth of trees meant for fuel creation. The primary issue with trees is that they are in no way a sugar form like their grass cousins more commonly used in ethanol production; they need to be broken down. The ways to break a tree down into the necessary from include chemical baths, which are potentially expensive and may leave unwanted waste chemicals, and engineered organic organisms. These organisms are the same things used to ferment plant matter, little animals that consume the plant and excrete a sugar, essentially the same process used in the first steps of alcohol production. There is however an issue with using the current variety of plant decomposers, they produce two types of sugars when their finished with a tree, 6 branch sugars and 5 branch sugars. The primary difference between 6’s and 5’s is that only 6’s are usable in ethanol production, while the 5’s produce excess waste if converted or simply result in low quality fuel. The upside of this lies in the fact that 5’s can also be resold for as much as if used for fuel for the creation of bio-plastics, fueling an additional green industry. All of the above information was provided by Norman Smits the director of communication and education; we found the trip to Oxford NC to be well worth it as we were welcomed into a meeting room for a question and answer session, along with a general overview of their operations. Their greenhouses contain newly resurrected and blight resistant variation of the American chestnut, which had been close to wiped out by pestilence. Further beyond their facility are sample crops of many possible fuel sources, everything from fast growing trees to giant grasses and industrial sweet potatoes. The North Carolina Bio-fuels center’s goal is to be able to tell people how to create and distribute their product in a financially sound way at competitive margins.