A leading university and a oil supermajor have renewed efforts to try to work out how to turn biomass into motor fuel.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison and ExxonMobil have announced a two-year renewal of an agreement to research chemistry behind the concept.
The research is part of a broad effort to identify scalable and commercially viable solutions to help meet increasing global energy demand with a renewable resource.
UW-Madison has long been known for its expertise in biomass conversion.
George Huber, the Harvey D. Spangler professor of chemical and biological engineering at UW-Madison, is working closely with ExxonMobil’s scientists to build a stronger understanding of the basic chemical transformations that occur during biomass conversion into diesel and jet fuels.
Vijay Swarup, vice president of research and development for ExxonMobil Research & Engineering Company said: “The renewal of our agreement with the University of Wisconsin-Madison will continue ExxonMobil’s work with top universities and scientists to discover and advance next-generation energy solutions.
“We look forward to continuing our collaboration with the university as we enhance our scientific understanding of advanced biofuels and explore potential new technologies.”
Over the past two years, research has focused on a multistep approach for converting cellulosic biomass to transportation fuels.
A new approach with the potential to reduce the number of processing steps will be explored in this collaboration.
This approach using solvents could potentially dissolve the entire biomass, which might make it possible to convert the whole biomass into fuel-sized molecules in a single reactor.
Another potential process that will be studied in this collaboration involves the catalytic transformation of bio-derived ethanol into bio-derived diesel and jet fuel.
Ethanol is currently produced from a range of sources and is widely used as an additive to gasoline.
This technology could potentially allow larger diesel and jet fuel molecules to be produced from renewable sources.
Professor Huber said: Biofuels have the potential to become a significant option for meeting growing global demand for diesel and jet fuel if low cost and scalable technologies can be developed.
“The focus of this fundamental research is to demonstrate technologies that could make such a scenario possible. We expect to use the same type of catalytic technologies that are already used in the petrochemical industry to convert oil into fuels and chemicals.”
