Reardon is a leader in effort to find new fuel source
Leader pushes to find new fuel sources
BY HALLIE WOODS
HallieWoods@coloradoan.com
Dr. Ken Reardon, a professor of chemistry and bioengineering at
Colorado State University, is pictured in a lab on campus. He is a
researcher in biofuels, especially algae, and is making a push to
find new fuel sources. Reardon is also the director of the Colorado
Center for Biorefining and Biofuels, or C2B2.
Think about squeezing energy from large-scale algae farms, or
genetically modifying bacteria to help turn plants into fuel sources
to power vehicles.
It may sound futuristic, but Fort Collins could make it happen in
the next year.
One of the leaders in the push to find new fuel sources is Ken
Reardon, a Colorado State University chemical and biological
engineering professor and a director of the Colorado Center for
Biorefining and Biofuels, or C2B2.
C2B2 is a collaborative organization comprised of CSU, the
University of Colorado, Colorado School of Mines and the National
Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden. Its focus is on the research
of new biofuels.
While Reardon has been looking at biofuels on and off since the
1970s, he hopes with the funding from sponsoring organizations of
C2B2 and the collaboration of minds from the different participating
research organizations that headway can be made in the area of
research.
“It won’t be headway that people outside of the research circle see
as major headway,” Reardon said. “But our approach has a lot of
potential.”
With several grants providing some of the necessary seed money,
Reardon hopes to look at specific areas of biofuel research in his
own studies.
The first major need for information is in the production of
biofuels from algae.
Fuel from algae is expensive to create, and no one knows how to do
it on a large scale, Reardon said.
“No one knows how to grow it in an economical way,” he said.
Reardon will also look at what is called reactor engineering -
learning how to manipulate how fuels are created with different
reactors to find optimal timing and output.
Third, Reardon wants to see changes in the process to make fuels
other than ethanol that have a more similar molecular structure to
gasoline.
And with the possible move away from ethanol, C2B2 will also begin
looking at other plants that can be better used for fuel production.
“If we want biofuels to be a significant part of fuel production,
they can’t compete with land used for fuel crops,” Reardon said.
While the number of directions research can move in the biofuel
field may seem overwhelming, Reardon is excited about the upcoming
findings that will come out of the collaboration.
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