Biofuel testing indicates use for industrial chemicals

Biofuel testing undertaken at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst has determined that biologically derived oils can be used to create the same industrial chemicals usually obtained from fossil-fuel-based petroleum.

Principal investigator Dr George Huber says: "We can meet the need to make commodity chemical feedstocks entirely through processing pyrolysis oils.

"We are making the same molecules from biomass that are currently being produced from petroleum."

He adds that there is no need to change manufacturing infrastructure in order to enable this to occur.

The biofuel testing could be important as stocks of oil begin to dwindle in the coming decades, as usable alternatives include waste wood, non-food crops and agricultural waste.

Pyrolysis oils - the cheapest product of the biomass process at present - could be used to create xylenes, benzene, olefins and toluene.

Dr Huber addresses research topics including biomass conversion, high-throughput testing, heterogeneous catalysis and kinetics, and catalyst characterisation.