Sugar can be used to provide fuels to cars
With exhausting fuel resources, and the threat of global warming from released carbon into the atmosphere looming over our heads, researchers and scientists around the world are looking for alternate sources of energy; and one of them is derived from the common day sugar we use.
A team of researchers has devised a two stage process for turning biomass derived sugar into 2, 5-dimethylfuran (DMF). This is basically a liquid transportation fuel that has a 40% more energy density than ethanol and is a sustainable carbon-neutral fuel that reduces the amount of global reliance on fossil fuels.
This fuel is produced with numerous steps in chemical engineering, starting with sugar. Sugar is passed through acid and copper catalysts, with butanol acting as a solvent and some salt. Presently, the only form of renewable liquid fuel that is produced on a large scale is ethanol.
However though ethanol is so widely produced, it has a low energy density which makes it evaporate readily. In addition to this, ethanol easily gets contaminated by absorbing water from the atmosphere. With this absorption, there is a need of an energy intensive distillation process that separates this fuel from the absorbed water.
This is one of the reasons why dimethylfuran is a preferred fuel over ethanol. It also has a high energy content which addresses all the shortcomings of ethanol. As DMF is not soluble in water, there is no question of it getting contaminated by the absorption of water from the atmosphere.
In addition to this, DMF is stable when stored. During the evaporation stage of its production, you find that it consumes only a third of the required energy for evaporating a solution of ethanol that is produced by fermentation in biofuel applications.
Basically, the new catalytic process used in the creation of DMF is an expansion of an earlier method. The previous process was improved so that it was possible to derive at a chemical intermediate, hydroxymethylfurfural from sugar. Millions of tons of such chemical intermediates are used in the industry. These intermediates are generally sourced from petroleum or natural gas and are used as the raw material in the production of many plastics, drugs and fuel.
The process of making HMF and then converting it to DMF is basically a balancing act of chemistry that follows a fixed pressure, reactor and temperature design. Here, fructose is converted to HMF in the presence of water, with the help of an acid catalyst in a solvent with a low boiling point.
Researchers found that adding salt to this reaction produces an improved extraction of HMF from the reactive water phase and also reduces the formation of impurities. In the latest process for converting HMF to DMF, it is done over a copper based catalyst where the conversion removes 2 oxygen atoms from the compound to lower its boiling point. This is the point where liquid turns to gas and with the temperature lowered, it is safe for transportation.
Though salt helped improve the production of HMF, it contributed chloride ions that poisoned the copper chromite catalyst. So these researchers developed a copper-ruthenium catalyst that provided chlorine resistance with superior performance.
Though this process has proven it possible to produce liquid transportation fuel from biomass with a higher energy density, more research has to be conducted before the method can be commercialized.
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There’s a lot of potential with any biomass-based fuel discovery. The only caveat is there are no positive net-energy sugar feedstocks available in meaningful, quantity that can be grown in the temperate/subtropical climates of the US.
Brazil’s use of sugar cane is a geographic aberration that has no direct relevance to the US energy plans unless we choose to make Brazil our primary source of sugar. Other sources of sugar like cellolosic biomass are very iffy still. If using Brazilian sugar was economically unacceptable for colas in the 1980 I don’t see how it can suddenly become more acceptable than Middle Eastern oil today.
Nonetheless, this is an interesting development that could someday fit into the mix of yet-to-be-developed technologies.
I’m still professionally partial to weedy-biodiesel though the best candidates are unlike to be taken serious because of their politically incorrect “dual-uses”. The next best is still solar in its various forms.