The Capital Times | September 18, 2008 | Anita Weier

A team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has developed a process that creates transportation fuel from plant material.

The alternative fuels developed by UW chemical and biological engineering professor James Dumesic and his team look a lot like the gasoline and diesel fuel used in vehicles today. That’s because the new fuels are identical at the molecular level to their petroleum-based counterparts. The only difference is where they come from.

A paper published in the Sept. 18 online version of the journal Science explains how they convert sugar into molecules that can be efficiently upgraded into gasoline, diesel and jet fuel. The research was funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy and is being published Thursday in the online version of the journal Science.

Many researchers have been focusing on trying to use nonedible materials instead of corn to make ethanol. They work with sugar materials from agricultural waste, corn leaves and stalks, switchgrass and forest residue. But instead of converting the water-soluble sugars derived from the cell walls of plants to ethanol, the new UW process could be used to convert sugars directly into gasoline, diesel and jet fuel components, Dumesic said.

“This work is a step along the way to making it practical to use biomass as fuel,” he added.

Sugars are an attractive basis for fuel because they are abundant, making up the largest portion of biomass, which is the organic material produced by plants. The oil layer created by Dumesic’s team retains 90 percent of the energy content in the original sugars.

Unlike petroleum, plant sugars contain equal numbers of carbon and oxygen atoms, making it difficult to create high-octane or diesel fuels. The solution is to remove almost all the oxygen atoms, leaving only a few to keep the molecules reactive. The molecules then can be “upgraded” into different forms of fuel, and Dumesic’s team has demonstrated three such upgrading processes.

“This is the same fuel we’re currently using, just from a different source,” said Dumesic. “It’s not something that burns like it — it is it.”

Edward Kunkes, a graduate student who is part of the team and a co-author of the article in Science, said that it would take several years to scale up the process for widespread use.

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