Process Yields High-Energy-Density Plant-Based Transportation Fuel

Friday, March 05 2010

A team of University of Wisconsin-Madison engineers has developed a highly efficient, environmentally friendly process that selectively converts gamma-valerolactone - a biomass derivative - into the chemical equivalent of jet fuel. The process preserves about 95 percent of the energy from the original biomass.

The process also requires little hydrogen input and captures carbon dioxide under high pressure for future beneficial use.

James Dumesic, professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering, postdoctoral researchers Jesse Bond and David Martin Alonso, and graduate students Dong Wang and Ryan West comprised the team.

Much of the Dumesic group's previous research of using cellulosic biomass for biofuels had focused on processes that convert abundant plant-based sugars into transportation fuels. However, in previously studied conversion methods, sugar molecules frequently degrade to form levulinic acid and formic acid — two products the previous methods couldn't readily transform into high-energy liquid fuels.

The team's new method exploits sugar's tendency to degrade. "Instead of trying to fight the degradation, we started with levulinic acid and formic acid and tried to see what we could do using that as a platform," says Dumesic.