How to Make it Easier to Turn Plant Waste into Biofuels

Researchers from Rutgers University have developed a new process that could make it much cheaper to produce biofuels such as ethanol from plant waste and reduce reliance on fossil fuels.

Their approach, featuring an ammonia-salt based solvent that rapidly turns plant fibers into sugars needed to make ethanol, works well at close to room temperature, unlike conventional processes, according to a Rutgers-led study in the journal Green Chemistry. It quickens the conversion of cellulose into sugars using enzymes. It can greatly reduce the cost of biofuels production because enzymes can account for about 15 percent to 20 percent of the cost of making biofuels like ethanol from biomass.

“Our pretreatment system can slash – by up to 50-fold – the use of enzymes to turn solvent-treated cellulose (plant fiber) into glucose (a sugar) used to make bioproducts like ethanol,” said lead author Shishir P. S. Chundawat, an assistant professor in the Department of Chemical and Biochemical Engineering in the School of Engineering at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. “Similar processes could greatly reduce the cost of producing biofuels from waste biomass like corn stalks and leaves.”

Read more at Rutgers University

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