Some things make no sense...

Chemical companies like Celanese, Dow, BASF, Eastman, oil companies like BP and Shell, and numerous other companies around the world produce butanol. They have big research budgets, and they would love to find an economical direct gasification route to butanol. These companies have looked at probably thousands of catalysts, and people have spent their careers working on this problem. The challenge is that syngas (produced from gasification) doesn’t like to form butanol. You can form a little bit directly, but CO (carbon monoxide) likes to do lots of things besides form a C4 alcohol like butanol. Scientific, I know, but Wikipedia could probably explain this process better than I could here.

Anyways, Methanol is not a problem. You can also produce ethanol, which is what Range Fuels is planning on doing (although you almost always have methanol to deal with as well). But the selectivity falls off sharply as you go to higher alcohols. By the time you get to butanol, you are lucky if 5% of the product is butanol.

So why does any of this amaze me? This is all known technology. It has been looked at for 50 years by multiple big companies spending untold millions of dollars. The economics simply don’t work, because of the very low yields. But a small company in Oregon still got someone to give them money to work on it:

"The only way Diesel Brewing could get its start was through Oregon’s business energy tax credit program — one of the most robust in the nation. The tax credit is worth 50 percent of their $1.4 million in capital costs," Stapleton said.

And then they also suggest that they will be profitable:

“Raines doesn’t expect to make a profit until the 100-ton-per-day plant is running.”

Don’t get me wrong, butanol is a fine fuel, and I have a special fondness for it (It burns quite well as a camping fuel). I would like to see it work out. But my observation is that people are seriously underestimating the difficulty of economically producing butanol from biomass.