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Is Vegetable Oil Biodiesel on the Right Track?
US - Want to fill up your Volkswagen or Hummer on renewables, as Arnold Schwarzenegger does? Biodiesel, a vegetable-oil based variant on petroleum diesel, is your fuel.According to Venturebeat, this fuel doesn’t get as much attention as high-tech biofuels like cellulosic ethanol and “green” gasoline. However, substances called furanics may help bring biodiesel back into the spotlight.
The news agency says that furanics, while not actually identical to biodiesel, might as well be — they burn in diesel engines quite well. Two researchers at the University of California, Davis say that a process they developed to reduce plant matter to furanics could be more efficient than existing methods for making cellulosic ethanol.
That should be a red flag for the ethanol industry, because furanics would use the same sort of feedstocks that current cellulosic ethanol processes do — woody materials like switchgrass and pulped timber. But cellulosic ethanol has proved difficult to make, requiring energy-intensive processes to break down the stiff cellulosic fibers. Professors Mascal and Nikitin say they’ve hit on a simple process to directly convert cellulose into furan.
A couple more details are at Chemical & Engineering News, while the full study was published in Angewandte Chemie, an international journal of chemistry.
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