Is Biobutanol The Next Generation Biofuel?

Des Moines Register, via Big Picture Agriculture:

A joint venture of DuPont and BP announced this morning that Lincolnway Energy of Nevada and Corn LP of Goldfield have reserved the option to convert their corn-fed ethanol operations to production of biobutanol, a fuel with higher energy content than  ethanol and which can also be made from either corn or corn residue.
The two Iowa plants will join Highwater Ethanol of Minnesota as “early adapters” to butanol, with a target of production for the automobile cosumer market by 2014.
The conversion won’t be cheap. Paul Beckwith, president of Butamax, the joint venture of BP and DuPont, said the price for the new equipment would be about 20-30 percent of the original cost of the plant. That would put the price tag up to $30 million for a 50 million gallon facility.
“This clearly is a nontrivial investment, and will require support from lenders,” said Beckwith, who works from DuPont’s headquarters in Wilmington, Del.
But the “early adapters,” to the proprietary technology developed by BP and DuPont, as Butamax calls them, will be able to produce a fuel that has 85 percent of the energy content of petroleum-refined gasoline versus the 66-70 percent in the current generation of corn-based ethanol.

When DuPont and BP announced they would be working on biobutanol back in 2008, I thought it would get to the market fairly quickly.  Two huge companies working on more efficient fuel seemed to me to indicate which way the market would end up going, especially since butanol can be shipped by pipeline.  But it has been a very slow process.  I had wondered recently whatever happened to the butanol concept, and now I know.