9/26/08 Bucky has an alternative energy answer! LIGNOCELLULOSE! And yes! It will be on the spelling test next week.


Funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy, Dumesic and his team have developed a process that creates transportation fuels from plant material. The 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.
"Domestically, there are large amounts of lignocellulose available that are not being used effectively for energy," says Dumesic. "This work is a step along the way to making it practical to use biomass as fuel."
Sugars are an attractive basis for fuel because they are abundant. Sugars comprise the largest portion of biomass, and the oil layer created by Dumesic retains 90 percent of the energy content in the original sugars.
The process of converting sugar into fuel begins by adding a solid catalyst to an aqueous solution, leading to the formation of an organic oil-like solution floating on top of the water. The oil layer, which is easily transportable, contains molecules of acids, alcohols, ketones and cyclics, which Dumesic calls "functional intermediates." These molecules are the precursors to fuel.
Unlike petroleum, plant sugars contain equal numbers of carbon and oxygen atoms, making it difficult to create high-octane or cetane fuels. The solution is to remove almost all the oxygen atoms, leaving only a few to keep the molecules reactive. The reactive molecules then can then 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," says Dumesic. "It's not something that burns like it — it is it."
SOURCE: University of Wisconsin-Madison