Jet Fuel from Plants

Technology Review (MIT)
By Nidhi Subbaraman
Monday, August 09, 2010

A way to get a high-energy fuel out of an abundant and renewable resource.

Researchers at a startup in Colorado have turned plant scraps into jet fuel, an important demonstration that high-energy fuels can be made efficiently from renewable and abundant biomass.

The company, Gevo, has engineered a yeast that helps transform the cellulose found in wood chips and plant stalks into butanol, an ingredient of gasoline. The researchers can then modify the butanol into jet fuel.

Butanol has 30 percent more energy than an equal amount of a conventional biofuel such as ethanol. Because of that appeal, such companies as Cobalt Biofuels, Gevo, and DuPont have been developing ways to cheaply and efficiently produce butanol from renewable sources. One method starts with the sugars in the starch of corn and sugarcane. Another way to do it is with the cellulose found in plant stalks and wood chips. It has been easier to design yeasts and bacteria to ferment starch-based sugars into butanol, but the abundance of natural cellulose makes it a better raw material for biofuel production, says Mike Cleary, director of the National Bioenergy Center at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

Read more