Advanced biofuels – liquid fuels synthesized from the sugars in
cellulosic biomass – offer a clean, green and renewable alternative to
gasoline, diesel and jet fuels.
Bringing the costs of producing these
advanced biofuels down to competitive levels with petrofuels, however,
is a major challenge. Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy
(DOE)’s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI), a bioenergy research center
led by Berkeley Lab, have taken another step towards meeting this
challenge with the development of a new technique for pre-treating
cellulosic biomass with ionic liquids – salts that are liquids rather
than crystals at room temperature.
This new technique requires none of
the expensive enzymes used in previous ionic liquid pretreatments, and
makes it easier to recover fuel sugars and recycle the ionic liquid.
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| Ning Sun of the Joint BioEnergy Institute was lead author on a paper describing an enzyme-free ionic liquid pretreatment of biomass that can help boost the production of advanced biofuels. (Photo by Roy Kaltschmidt) |
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