New biofuels process tested at US university

A research team in the US claims to have developed a new biofuels process involving water, electricity and biomass.

The team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have come up with a technology that uses a fuel cell to convert biomass compound acetone into isopropanol, a chemical that’s used as a petrol additive.

According to chemical and biological engineering professor George Huber the technology ‘creates a renewable liquid fuel that fits into existing infrastructure. It’s what we call electrofuel’.

By using fuel cell reactor technology that had been studied for making cars which run on hydrogen and shifting it into reverse, it then uses water and electricity in a chemical reaction to generate hydrogen, which then reacts with biomass molecules and reduces it to fuel.

‘The advantage of this is, wherever you have cheap biomass and you have electricity, you could use this technology,’ Huber adds.