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The global warming and climate change problems have become more serious because of the high consumption of fossil fuels during the past century. Recently, biofuels have attracted interest as an option to reduce the extensive use of fossil fuels; particularly, biobutanol appears as an option to replace the petroleum-based fuels. However, the separation process to produce biobutanol requires a lot of energy and yields lots of waste heat at low temperature. Therefore, there is a need to propose options to reduce the required energy in the biobutanol separation process. Consequently, this paper presents an optimization approach for designing energy integrated biobutanol separation processes. The optimization incorporates attractive separation options such as ABE fermentation using different solvents as well as incorporating several options for waste heat recovery involving integrated heat exchanger networks, stream Rankine cycles, organic Rankine cycles, and absorption refrigeration cycles. The results show significant economic and environmental benefits for the simultaneous consideration of the optimization of the separation process with the waste heat recovery for the biobutanol separation process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents information about Stephen McIntyre, a semiretired businessman. McIntyre's attack on one climate-change study, known as the hockey stick, got him featured on the front-page of the February 14, 2005, issue of the Wall Street Journal. In June, U.S. Representative Joe Barton demanded that prominent researchers turn over the raw data from the hockey-stick analysis. Researchers criticized the journal and Barton. However scientists look at these events, the success of climate change skeptic McIntyre hints at why the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report and other mainstream, peer-reviewed global climate studies have failed to persuade the U.S. Congress that action is needed to curb greenhouse gas emissions. McIntyre began his career in climate studies in 2003 when he published a paper in Energy & Environment. McIntyre outlined what they called serious errors in the hockey-stick analysis. McIntyre was flown to Washington, D.C., to brief U.S. business leaders and senators. After this fleeting brush with fame, McIntyre retreated to Canada and began a more aggressive attack on the hockey stick. He launched a blog to attract attention to his research. In early January of 2005, he finally had a paper accepted into a real science journal Geophysical Research Letters. Within weeks of publishing his first study, McIntyre was profiled on the front page of the Wall Street Journal.