Affordable fuel from grasses, trees and plant waste that packs enough of a punch to power a plane? Scientists said Wednesday this can be done using chemistry to boost basic fermentation processes.
A team at the University of California in Berkeley said it had developed a method to add carbon atoms to biofuels obtained from fermentation -- currently not potent enough to replace gasoline, jet fuel or diesel.
Using the same 100-year-old biological process employed in ethanol production, the team manufactured alcohol and acetone by fermenting sugars obtainable from anything from grasses, trees, corn, sugar beets, sorghum or even plant waste, according to a study in the journal Nature.
The alcohol and acetone is then put through a catalytic chemical process to boost the number of carbon atoms from two per molecule, as in traditional ethanol, to between seven and 15, co-author Harvey Blanch told AFP.
This is similar to the carbon mass of current jet and diesel fuels.
Using similar raw materials, "you get a better product than ethanol for the same price," said Blanch.
"With the same amount of sugar, we make a fuel that is much more effective than ethanol for the same price of the sugar."
Writing in Nature, the team said it had developed "a high-yield method for transforming readily accessible fermentation products from a variety of carbohydrates into precursors for petrol, diesel and jet fuels.
"The integration of extractive fermentation with chemical catalysis is thus a novel and potentially enabling route for the economical conversion of biomass into liquid transportation fuels."
Blanch said ethanol, the most commonly used biofuel, is not very efficient as it cannot be transported in oil pipelines and so has to be moved by truck, and does not mix well with diesel.
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Scientists use chemistry to add oomph to biofuel
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