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IU Biologists Make Bioethanol Discovery Using Nitrogen

By Indiana Public Media News Staff

Posted February 10, 2015

A team of biologists at Indiana University says it may have found a faster, cheaper and cleaner way to increase bioethanol production by using nitrogen.

When Indiana University biology professor Jake McKinlay and his team first saw that a bacteria used in the production of ethanol, called Zymomonas mobilis, could use nitrogen gas, they expected it would create less ethanol.

McKinlay says the bacteria consumes and uses glucose for three things: ethanol production, growth and nitrogen gas.

When they began research, McKinlay and his team expected the nitrogen would draw resources away from the ethanol production. Instead, it drew away from the bacteria's growth.

And he says this could mean big savings for the agriculture industry.

"Cellulosic ethanol has a lot more environmental benefits on the agricultural side than making ethanol from corn," McKinlay says. "It gets around this land use – food versus fuel argument."

Until recently, ethanol has been produced almost entirely by food crops, but cellulosic ethanol, which is made from wood, grasses and other fiber, has been on the rise since last year.

Cellulosic feed stocks have very low nitrogen contents meaning the industry has to add and spend extra money on that nitrogen to grow the yeast that makes ethanol.

The team's discovery could potentially eliminate those extra costs because nitrogen is so abundant in the atmosphere. It could serve as an inexpensive substitute for fertilizers during cellulosic ethanol production.

McKinlay says that the next step is to take it to the industrial level.

"Right now everything they've done in the lab is on a very small scale," he says. "Industrial reactors reach around 200 million liters. He says bringing it from a milliliters scale to hundreds of millions of liters is important so they can see how this can be integrated into industrial practice."

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