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Money Doesn’t Grow On Trees, But Gasoline Might
By Mr Ethanol | April 8, 2008
Wisbusiness.com:
In 2003, University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate student George Huber and colleagues made hydrogen from plant sugars using nickel-tin alloy catalysts in the lab of Chemical and Biological Engineering Professor James Dumesic.
In 2005, the team made a diesel-like fuel from plants.
Today, University of Massachusetts Amherst Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering George Huber has graduate students of his own.
Reporting in the cover article of today’s issue of “Chemistry & Sustainability, Energy & Materials,” Huber’s team announced the first direct conversion of plant cellulose into gasoline components. This “green gasoline” can be created from sustainable biomass sources like switchgrass and poplar trees.
In the same issue, Dumesic and his team at UW-Madison announced an integrated process for creating chemical components of jet fuel using a green gasoline approach. While Dumesic’s group had previously demonstrated the production of jet-fuel components by combining separate catalytic steps, its current work shows that these steps can be integrated together and run sequentially, without complex separation and purification processes between reactors.
While it may be five to ten years before these green fuels arrive at the pump or power a jet, these breakthroughs have bypassed significant hurdles to bringing biofuels to market.
“It is likely that the future consumer will not even know that they are putting biofuels into their car,” says Huber. “Biofuels in the future will most likely be similar in chemical composition to gasoline and diesel fuel used today. The challenge for chemical engineers is to efficiently produce liquid fuels from biomass while fitting into the existing infrastructure today.”
For their new approach, the UMass researchers rapidly heated cellulose in the presence of solid catalysts, materials that speed up reactions without sacrificing themselves in the process, and then rapidly cooled the products to create a liquid that contains many of the compounds found in gasoline. Continued…
Topics: Biofuel, Energy, Gas, Green Business, Science |
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