Report Maps a Pathway for Producing World’s Only Sustainable Liquid Fuels

George Huber, the John and Elizabeth Armstrong Professional Development Professor from the Chemical Engineering Department, has produced a 187-page roadmap for making hydrocarbon biofuel – liquid fuel derived from plant biomass – into a viable and sustainable alternative to fossil fuel in this country. The roadmap publication, which has just been distributed to the press, combines the expertise of some 70 top scientists and engineers in the field of biofuels and is entitled Breaking the Chemical and Engineering Barriers to Lignocellulosic Biofuels: Next Generation Hydrocarbon Biorefineries.

As the roadmap publication states: “A concerted effort to accelerate the development of domestically produced alternative transportation fuels promises to reduce our national dependence on foreign oil, spur economic development and improve environmental quality in the United States.”

The biofuels roadmap is being sponsored by the National Science Foundation, the American Chemical Society and the Department of Energy. Dr. Huber produced the publication at UMass Amherst as a follow-up to a high-level workshop he chaired in Washington, D.C., last June that was attended by about 70 biofuel experts.

“This workshop was actually based on a review paper I did in which I recorded all the various routes to make biofuels,” says Huber.

Plant biomass is the only current sustainable source of organic carbon, and biofuels are the only current sustainable source of liquid fuels.

“The argument I make in my review paper,” adds Huber, “is that most of the routes to making biofuels are actually chemical routes. Currently, chemical catalysis is the enabling technology that allows us to refine our petroleum and convert it into fuels and chemicals. By the same token, catalysis will allow us to take our biomass resources and convert them into fuels and chemicals. So the purpose of this workshop was to talk about how chemistry and catalysis and chemical engineering will be vitally important to making biofuels happen.”

Currently lignocellulosic biomass, or biomass derived from trees and grasses, is significantly cheaper than petroleum and abundant enough to provide the energy content of 60 percent of our domestic crude oil consumption. However, the chief impediment to the utilization of our biomass resources is the lack of economical processes for conversion of biomass resources into fuels.

“To develop these processes,” says Huber, “it is necessary to understand and overcome the key chemical and engineering barriers, and develop the enabling technologies that will allow us to use our biomass resources efficiently.”

The roadmap publication identifies the basic research needs and opportunities in catalytic chemistry and materials science that underpin biomass conversion and fuel utilization, with a focus on emerging areas that have the potential for significant impact. The report illuminates the principal technological barriers and the underlying scientific limitations associated with efficient processing of biomass resources into finished fuels.

    The main limiting factor to biofuels production, quite simply, is that low-cost processing technologies do not yet exist that can efficiently convert a large fraction of the lignocellulosic biomass energy into liquid fuels.

Huber of the Chemical Engineering Department at UMass Amherst has recently received a prestigious $400,000 CAREER grant from the National Science Foundation to pursue his revolutionary new method for making “green gasoline” from wood or grasses, a process that would be much less expensive than gasoline or corn-ethanol. His pioneering method is being reported in the next issue of the ChemSusChem journal, a publication devoted to environmentally sound chemistry.

Last spring Huber was named as the John and Elizabeth Armstrong Professional Development Professor at UMass Amherst and is a nationally recognized expert on biofuels.

Cellulosic biofuel has a marvelous upside. At $10 to $30 per barrel, fuel derived from cellulosic biomass is significantly cheaper than crude oil. The U.S. could potentially produce 1.3-billion dry tons of cellulosic biomass per year which has the energy content of four-billion barrels of crude oil. That’s more than half of the seven-billion barrels of crude oil per year now consumed in our country. Among other boons, biofuel could reduce domestic carbon dioxide emissions by 85 percent. What’s more, biomass as an energy crop could increase the national farm income by $3- to $6-billion per year. (April 2008)