Under construction

Background

Climate change is argued to be one of the greatest challenges faced by mankind. The current climate change is mainly caused by us humans as we have been using the Earth’s precious fossil fuel stocks without returning the emitted gases into the natural carbon cycle. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), even if we could stop all the emissions right now, the Earth’s average temperature would rise 0.6°C. [1] This means we must act now. To fight climate change we have come up with a solution which would tackle the emissions made by the road transportation. These emissions make up a considerable 11% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. [2]

While power generation accounts for about a quarter of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, 11% might seem like a small number. [2] What makes emissions made by transportation significant, though, is that there are currently no good alternatives for gasoline. Electric cars are emerging, but they still have quite a way to go before reaching the price-range suitable for middle class. [3] Propane is already widely used as a replacement of gasoline. In South Korea, 2.2 million vehicles [4] run on propane and in Turkey, 37% of passenger cars use it. On a large scale though, only 1.2% of vehicles worldwide are suitable to run on propane. [4] This may seem discouraging, but in reality converting a gasoline motor into a propane one is quite simple and inexpensive. DIY converter kits are sold online for less than $500. In Canada, depending on the vehicle type, conversion done by a third party costs somewhere around 2500-6500 dollars. [5]

On top of its use as a transportation fuel, propane is also a popular cooking fuel in developing countries. It’s more commonly used in urban areas, as access to propane can be difficult in rural areas. Nevertheless, according to the International Energy Association (IEA), about 20% of household in the rural areas of Botswana use propane as their source of energy. In the urban areas the usage is around 60%. Expansive infrastructure is in place for example in Brazil, where 98% of households have access to propane due to government funded efforts. [6] One major goal of promoting propane is to replace currently used biomass fuels, including wood. Wood consumption is often unsustainable and threatens the local ecosystems. Additionally, the traditional fuels (biomass and coal) produce high emissions of carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons and particulate matter. IEA suggests that these impurities are responsible for more premature deaths than Malaria in developing countries. [6]

Propane can be considered a clean fuel, as it emits less CO2 than gasoline and ethanol and, when compared with traditional biomasses, has significantly smaller emission factors based on both mass and energy delivery. [7] Thus, propane is a viable option for replacing traditional biomasses as cooking fuel, although currently the price is not competitive without government subsidies.

However, the propane we are currently using is produced as a side product of the petrochemical industry. This initially means that propane is a fossil fuel, emitting stored CO2 into the atmosphere without a way of returning to the natural carbon cycle. This contributes not only to climate change but also ocean acidification. This endangers the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people directly or indirectly dependent on the marine ecosystems. [8]

Our Project

We would like to produce environmentally sustainable propane, using waste cellulose as its carbon source. This would allow us to return the CO2 released by the burned propane back into the carbon cycle and again reuse the carbon bound into the plant material to produce propane. There are 200 million tonnes of sustainable cellulose available for use in EU alone per year, which could be used as a raw material for propane production. This cellulose is obtained from household paper, food and garden waste, forestry and crop residues. Using cellulosic waste wouldn’t have an impact on the food prices or require increases in the agricultural land use. [9]

Our goal is to also propose a small-scale system to make our propane production continuous, which would enable reliable and stable source of ecologically sustainable fuel. Unlike oil and natural gas, propane fermentors aren’t geographically tied to certain locations. This could be used to lessen the economic dependencies between countries, by giving more chances to become self-sufficient with energy. Localization would also prevent the transfer costs and infrastructure needed to distribute fossil fuels and further reduces emissions from transportation.