Obtaining biofuels through a simple chemical process

The special and new mixture of solvents and additives, for which a patent application has already been submitted, has an extraordinary ability to dissolve cellulose, one of the most common organic materials on the planet, which many researchers consider a promising alternative to fossil fuels

A chemical process in just two steps converts raw biomass into biofuel. The key step in the new process is the first step, where cellulose is converted into 5-hydroxymethylfurfural HMF, which is a starting material for a wide range of valuable chemicals.

"Other groups have already demonstrated some of the separate steps involved in the conversion of biomass to HMF, when the starting material is glucose or fructose," says Ronald Raines, a professor in the departments of biochemistry and chemistry at the University of Wisconsin in the US. "In contrast, we performed the entire process in one step, where the starting material is the biomass itself."

The research team has developed a unique solvent system that enables the above process. The special and new mixture of solvents and additives, for which a patent application has already been submitted, has an extraordinary ability to dissolve cellulose, a polymer consisting of long chains of high-energy sugar molecules found in plants. Since cellulose is one of the most common organic materials on Earth, many researchers consider it a promising alternative to fossil fuels.

"The solvent system is able to dissolve cotton wool, which is essentially pure cellulose," explains the lead researcher. "And this is a simple system - not corrosive, dangerous, expensive or smelly."

At the same time, this approach circumvents another irritating problem - lignin, the vegetable glue that holds together the walls of plant cells. This material serves as a cage that protects the cellulose it wraps. However, the research team used chemicals that are small enough to slip between the lignin particles, where they work by dissolving the cellulose, breaking it down into its individual components and converting these components directly into the desired end product HMF.

In the second step, the research team converted this material into the promising biofuel 2,5-dimethylfuran (DMF). Together, the overall utilization of this two-step conversion process of biomass to biofuel was nine percent, that is, nine percent of the cotton, which was in the original plant sample, was converted to biofuel.

"The utilization of the final product is still not great, but the second stage has not yet been optimized," says the researcher, who is excited about the material's good prospects of being used as biofuel. The material has, he explains, the same amount of energy as gasoline, does not dissolve in water (and therefore will not contaminate the various water reservoirs) and is suitable for liquid fuel transport infrastructures that already exist. It is already used today as an additive to gasoline.

In addition to wool-cotton, the research team also tested their method for sawdust from pine trees and the researchers will collect additional samples of different types. Our method is so general that I believe we can prepare these two important substances (DMF, HMF) from any type of biomass," says the lead researcher.

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