DuPont and BP said Thursday that European Union officials have approved a joint venture to develop and produce what they termed a new generation of biofuels to help meet demand for renewable fuels with reduced greenhouse gas emissions.
 
The two corporate giants have been working together since 2003 to develop advanced biofuels with properties that can help overcome the limitations of current biofuels, in part their reliance on cornbased additives. They formed a partnership in 2006 to focus on the work.
 
"The joint venture would be active in the development and commercialization of production technologies for biobutanol, a fuel component produced from biomass," the European Commission, the EU's administrative arm, said Thursday. Use of biomass material spares crops such as corn that are essential to the world's food supply.
 
BP and some U.S. universities are investing about $500 million in research into turning waste biomass into biofuels.
 
Biofuels, which now make up 2 percent of the global transport fuel mix, may account for 11 percent to 19 percent of the global transport fuel market by 2030, according to BP. The company supplied about 10 percent of the global biofuel market in 2008.
 
The companies said in announcing their 2006 partnership that the combination merges DuPont's biotechnology and manufacturing capabilities with BP's expertise in fuel technology and marketing.
 
Into addition to the advantage of not relying on food crops, biobutanol has a higher energy density than ethanol and better tolerance of water contamination in gasoline blends.
 
The companies said it has the potential to be blended into gasoline at higher concentrations than current biofuels without the need to retrofit vehicles. It also offers better fuel economy than gasoline-ethanol blends.
 
Initial production of biobutanol will be based on an established technology, enabling early commercial market introduction, the companies said.
 
Production is intended to use a range of feedstocks such as sugar cane or sugar beet, corn, wheat, or cassava and, in the future, cellulosic feedstocks from fast-growing crops such as grasses, or agricultural byproducts such as straw and corn stalks.
 
Since production of biobutanol is similar to ethanol and uses similar feedstocks, current ethanol capacity can be retrofitted to produce biobutanol.
 
Biobutanol will provide significant environmental benefits, reducing overall emissions of greenhouse gases. Biofuels help maintain, and potentially even reduce, the volume of carbon dioxide emissions entering the atmosphere because the plants used to produce biofuels absorb carbon dioxide as they grow.