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Money Doesn't Grow on Trees, But Gasoline Might (4/12/2008)
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| Components for green gasoline can be sythesized in a laboratory from agricultural waste. New processes are breaking the barriers to producing green gasoline on the large scale needed for industrial produciton. - Credit: Ben Barnhart |
Researchers make breakthrough in creating gasoline from plant matter, with almost no carbon footprint
Researchers have made a breakthrough in the development of "green gasoline," a liquid identical to standard gasoline yet created from sustainable biomass sources like switchgrass and poplar trees.
Reporting in the cover article of the April 7, 2008 issue of Chemistry & Sustainability, Energy & Materials (ChemSusChem), chemical engineer and National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER awardee George Huber of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst (UMass) and his graduate students Torren Carlson and Tushar Vispute announced the first direct conversion of plant cellulose into gasoline components.
In the same issue, James Dumesic and colleagues from the University of Wisconsin-Madison announce 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 using separate steps, their current work shows that the steps can be integrated and run sequentially, without complex separation and purification processes between reactors.
While it may be five to 10 years before green gasoline arrives at the pump or finds its way into a fighter jet, these breakthroughs have bypassed significant hurdles to bringing green gasoline biofuels to market.
"It is likely that the future consumer will not even know that they are putting biofuels into their car," said 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. They then rapidly cooled the products to create a liquid that contains many of the compounds found in gasoline.
The entire process was completed in under two minutes using relatively moderate amounts of heat. The compounds that formed in that single step, like naphthalene and toluene, make up one fourth of the suite of chemicals found in gasoline. The liquid can be further treated to form the remaining fuel components or can be used "as is" for a high octane gasoline blend.
"Green gasoline is an attractive alternative to bioethanol since it can be used in existing engines and does not incur the 30 percent gas mileage penalty of ethanol-based flex fuel," said John Regalbuto, who directs the Catalysis and Biocatalysis Program at NSF and supported this research.
"In theory it requires much less energy to make than ethanol, giving it a smaller carbon footprint and making it cheaper to produce," Regalbuto said. "Making it from cellulose sources such as switchgrass or poplar trees grown as energy crops, or forest or agricultural residues such as wood chips or corn stover, solves the lifecycle greenhouse gas problem that has recently surfaced with corn ethanol and soy biodiesel."
Beyond academic laboratories, both small businesses and Fortune 500 petroleum refiners are pursuing green gasoline. Companies are designing ways to hybridize their existing refineries to enable petroleum products including fuels, textiles, and plastics to be made from either crude oil or biomass and the military community has shown strong interest in making jet fuel and diesel from the same sources.
"Huber's new process for the direct conversion of cellulose to gasoline aromatics is at the leading edge of the new 'Green Gasoline' alternate energy paradigm that NSF, along with other federal agencies, is helping to promote," states Regalbuto.
Not only is the method a compact way to treat a great deal of biomass in a short time, Regalbuto emphasized that the process, in principle, does not require any external energy. "In fact, from the extra heat that will be released, you can generate electricity in addition to the biofuel," he said. "There will not be just a small carbon footprint for the process; by recovering heat and generating electricity, there won't be any footprint."
The latest pathways to produce green gasoline, green diesel and green jet fuel are found in a report sponsored by NSF, the Department of Energy and the American Chemical Society entitled "Breaking the Chemical and Engineering Barriers to Lignocellulosic Biofuels: Next Generation Hydrocarbon Biorefineries" released April 1 (http://www.ecs.umass.edu/biofuels/). In the report, Huber and a host of leaders from academia, industry and government present a plan for making green gasoline a practical solution for the impending fuel crisis.
"We are currently working on understanding the chemistry of this process and designing new catalysts and reactors for this single step technique. This fundamental chemical understanding will allow us to design more efficient processes that will accelerate the commercialization of green gasoline," Huber said.
Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by NSF
Comments:
| 1. |
Uncle B |
4/12/2008 6:17:10 PM MST |
Sign me up for Ethanol, or better yet, hydrogen/fuel cell cars with hydrogen supplied as a storable byproduct of solar/electric plants in the deserts, or over anything that contains the cancer causing benzine molecule, the true enemy of all oil and its derivatives. |
| 2. |
Garrett |
4/12/2008 7:36:56 PM MST |
Great. So instead of burning fossil fuels, we can just keep burning trees?
I guess if it keeps us going a bit longer...
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| 3. |
Joal Heagney |
4/12/2008 8:09:53 PM MST |
Tolune and naphthalene may CONTAIN the benzene unit, but they don't cause cancer like benzene. In fact tolune is used in organic chemistry as a benzene-like solvent wherever it is possible because organic chemists are as/more paranoid about benzene than anyone else. (Ex-organic chemist.)
As for naphthalene - heard of mothballs and camphorwood?
Other molecules based on benzene include certain amino acids, styrofoam, kevlar, asprin and antibiotics - to name a few.
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| 4. |
Tim |
4/12/2008 9:29:21 PM MST |
Anyone know what the catalyst is? or where the paper is published so we can attempt to duplicate these (cold fusion) results? |
| 5. |
gatzke |
4/12/2008 9:32:08 PM MST |
So I guess the usa will be invading the Amazon Rainforest next??? |
| 6. |
mgroves |
4/13/2008 1:07:43 PM MST |
If only there was a way to replant and grow more trees... |
| 7. |
Sam Davis |
4/14/2008 9:53:57 AM MST |
The cost is the bottom line decision-maker. At some point, it will become economically feasible to make "bio-gas" if the price of crude oil escalates too much. We already know, for instance, how to make gasoline from coal -- we did it during World War II -- but the cost has not been competitive.
Oil and its derivative products are fungible commodities. Absent emotional hysteria around such illusory issues as "energy independence," the market will begin providing biofuels as soon as it becomes competitive to do so.
With government intervention, meaning all taxpayers forced to subsidize it, the production of biofuels has so far been a disaster.
This is solid research, however, and will be used in the future; but, we would be wiser to let the market determine when.
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| 8. |
GeraldNZ |
4/14/2008 11:18:00 PM MST |
I agree with Sam Davis on all points, but I do support government subsidies for research such as this (not its commercialisation). For one thing, there are potentially big positive externalities if this kind of research is successful. For another, entrepeneurs and researchers have different specialist skills: you can't expect entrepeneurs to necessarily have the "nose" for a good research topic that a scientist might have, and you can't necessarily expect a scientist to have the entrepeneurial skills to secure adequate funding for their cool research project. At some point you just have to let the scientists go to it. |
| 9. |
Trent H |
4/15/2008 7:07:46 AM MST |
listen, trees are in fact one of our most renewable resources. And this new technology can only lead to more plantings. If it catches on i think we just solved multiple problems
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| 10. |
Alex Nuta |
4/15/2008 10:32:46 AM MST |
A pointless waste of brilliant minds' time. |
| 11. |
Zsig |
4/16/2008 9:17:25 AM MST |
Q: How do we get the plant matter to the factory to convert it to biofuel?
A: Well, we put it in trucks.
Q: So, how do you power the trucks?
A: With Biofuel. From the Plant matter... Oh, I see. Doh!
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| 12. |
Davin |
4/18/2008 9:46:17 AM MST |
My question for this is not really where it comes from. Honestly, things like switchgrass are much less destructive to the land than corn farming (to my knowledge, not a soil specialist, just know that corn depletes nutrients rapidly).
But really, my question is the emissions. What real good does it do if it's still emitting toxic fumes in our cities? It's carbon footprint to create it may be relatively low, but when mom, dad, and kids all drive their SUV from suburbia to work and school, how much damage is it doing relative to what crude based petroleum is doing now?
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| 13. |
Baz |
4/18/2008 9:33:49 PM MST |
If we're all going to be growing fuel now who is going to feed us? |
| 14. |
DRTice |
4/19/2008 6:01:58 PM MST |
So if I am out in the woods hunting all the trees could explode? |
| 15. |
fraxyl |
4/21/2008 6:49:46 AM MST |
Davin, I had the same concern. It's not really addressed is it. If the fuel burning still produces greenhouse gasses, there won't be much 'biomass' to convert eventually. |
| 16. |
Tyler |
4/21/2008 11:56:17 AM MST |
Baz has a good point, if it is more cost effective to grow fuel than food guess what farms are going to do. Just because they are blue collar workers doesn't mean they are stupid, we are just prolonging the problem. |
| 17. |
James |
4/22/2008 6:19:16 PM MST |
A windmill only needs to be built once. Too much effort year after year for some crop and I'm sure the soil quality will degrade as the nutrients are just burned away. |
| 18. |
The1CalledJ |
4/24/2008 3:10:10 PM MST |
Get off the fuel that comes from plants! Either long dead plants or recently dead plants. Japan tried doing this at the end of WWII and ended up cutting down most of their forests. Biofules don't work history has proven this. As we run out of oil we should stop handing a crutch to the oil industry. We had better technology being produced at the turn of the twentieth century than we do today. Don't believe me try doing a search on wikipedia for Nikola Tesla. and read about some of his experiments. Unless you want to put trees into the same category as the dinosaurs. There are plenty of other ways to create energy lets put our efforts into those. Or we can continue to whip this dead horse called oil. |
| 19. |
Tim |
4/29/2008 10:56:09 AM MST |
It is difficult to beat the power density and transportation efficiency of liquid fuels. Gasoline contains almost 10kWh of energy per gallon. Imagine trying charge a 1MWh battery pack (without any heating problems) in the same amount of time it takes to load 100gallons of gasoline. Compare the weight of a charged 1MWh battery to the 650lbs of fuel, which decreases as it is used. |
| 20. |
Shannon |
5/3/2008 10:35:35 AM MST |
No dummies, we can synthesize or duplicate
by chemical synthesis. Therefore we won't
go into the rain forest, genius. Go suck on a muffler!
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| 21. |
Nick |
7/8/2008 1:42:01 PM MST |
How much grass or common trees do you have to grow to supply enough for just one vehicle? Sounds similar to the "Corn Scam" we have now. If we used all the corn in the world just for fuel and nothing else (Like Eating) it would only reduce todays conventional oil consumption by 11%. |
| 22. |
Nick |
7/8/2008 1:46:27 PM MST |
Oh and Shannon thats not true. Nice in theory but if we could do that we would do it with every resource we use. |
| 23. |
Shannon |
7/14/2008 2:38:14 PM MST |
At least the plasma converters will be able to make the fuel last, with high
capabilities of less fuel emissions.
How about the US military electric drive trains, why can't we all have them?
So, the only option at my finger tips is the vegetable oil conversion kits, preferably with out all the basement filtering steps in between. As previously stated, we already replicate
our medicines, foods, cleaners and other oils. Why not- this is a new age of evolution, anything is possible- and
I am just a kid.
UMASS has had it for years, the missing link was already found for the compound to be complete.
When will it be regulated, 10-15 years
for flying cars? Support your local science, make it regional. If you sell it they will come. Look at the Veggie car Hampshire college- Come on money shakers are you going to let Hampshire College beat you?
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