09-21-2008, 11:36 AM
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 Move Over Ethanol - Sugar Into Gasoline Is Cheaper And Easier, Say Researchers
Submitted by News Staff on 18 September 2008 - 3:00am. Energy
Two research teams are announcing this month that they have successfully converted sugar-potentially derived from agricultural waste and non-food plants-into gasoline, diesel, jet fuel and a range of other valuable chemicals.
Chemical engineer Randy Cortright and his colleagues at Virent Energy Systems of Madison, Wisc., and researchers led by NSF-supported chemical engineer James Dumesic of the University of Wisconsin at Madison are now announcing that sugars and carbohydrates can be processed like petroleum into the full suite of products that drive the fuel, pharmaceutical and chemical industries.
The physical properties of Virent's Biogasoline product spontaneously separate from water. This requires very little energy for processing compared with the energy-intensive process of distillation required for ethanol purification.
(Photo Credit: Virent Energy Systems, Inc.)
The process Virent discovered in early 2006, and announced at the Growing the Bioeconomy conference sponsored by Iowa State University on Sept. 9, 2008, is the subject of patent applications published last week.
That announcement was followed this month by the publication of a separate discovery of the same process in the Dumesic laboratory. Dumesic and his colleagues announced their findings in the Sept. 18, 2008 online ScienceExpress.
The key to the breakthrough is a process developed by both Dumesic and Cortright called aqueous phase reforming. In passing a watery slurry of plant-derived sugar and carbohydrates over a series of catalysts-materials that speed up reactions without sacrificing themselves in the process-carbon-rich organic molecules split apart into component elements that recombine to form many of the chemicals that are extracted from non-renewable petroleum.
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The key words are "non-renewable petroleum" to me. As we suck out all the Earth's resources, who knows what we really are doing to the environment? It's about time that we figure out a better way to get what we need using renewable resources.  |
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