Revolutionary New Process Turns Biomass Waste into Fuel Oil

A University of Maine engineer and his research team have discovered a revolutionary new chemical process that can transform forest residues, along with other materials such as municipal solid waste, grasses, and construction wastes into hydrocarbon fuel oil products. Shortening up the process from biomass to hydrocarbons has long been an idea of intense interest, and usually skipped over to the easier fermentation, pyrolysis and other schemes to get molecular change.

Maine is driven by circumstances, a lot of wood, some 6 million green tons of additional available biomass, according to a 2008 Maine Forest Service Assessment of Sustainable Biomass Availability. The new process suggests the biomass could yield 120 million gallons per year of gasoline, diesel, heating oil and kerosene mixtures while providing all the steam and power needs of the processing plants. The whole of the U.S. transportation industry, which is dependent on hydrocarbon fuels because of their high energy density, could benefit from the revolutionary finding.

The new process was developed by M. Clayton Wheeler, a UMaine associate professor of chemical and biological engineering, and undergraduate students in his lab. Based on a mixed-carboxylate platform, the fuel has been determined to have a number of properties that make it better suited to serve as a drop in fuel than many alternative fuels being widely researched and, bravely suggested, even those currently on the market......Read the entire article.

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