The United States has long needed a comprehensive energy policy; and passage of The Energy Policy Act of 2005 by Congress was the first step toward achieving that goal. The Act has hundreds of provisions; but of interest to us is Title XV – Ethanol and Motor Fuels, which eliminated the oxygen content requirement for reformulated gasoline (Sec. 1503) and established a Renewable Fuel Standard (Sec. 1501) that calls for the addition of 4.7 billion gallons of ethanol to gasoline in 2007 and ramps that up to 7.5 billion gallons in 2012. Meanwhile MTBE (methyl tertiary butyl ether) has been banned by many states, leaving only ethanol as an acceptable additive to meet the pollution reduction requirements of the Clean Air Act.
This mandate has created a flurry of activity in the ethanol industry with 41 new plants having production totaling 2 billion gallons per year either under construction or announced as of January 2006. Interestingly, all of these plants continue to use distillation and molecular sieve drying to convert fermentation broth (which is a dilute aqueous ethanol mixture) to the required 99.5% fuel-grade ethanol; however, because ethanol and water form an azeotrope, the distillation process is both capital and energy intensive.
Trans Ionics is developing a unique process called ESep that is capable of producing fuel-grade ethanol without distillation, and is expected to result in substantial savings in capital equipment costs and in energy consumption.
