Scientists convert glucose into fuel and polyesters

Glucose has been the building block for many zany creations 'round these parts, but using the widely available substance to create "products currently created from petroleum" has some fairly far reaching consequences. Gurus at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have reportedly "converted sugars ubiquitous in nature into a primary building block for fuel and polyesters," dubbed hydroxymethylfurfural (HMF). Aside from the obvious benefits of finding yet another renewable energy to tap into, learning to harness this power could give garb and plastic manufacturers new routes to source raw materials. So what do the creators themselves think? "The opportunities are endless" -- we say: prove it.

[lettcco @ Jun 16th 2007 2:10AM]

won't be long before Exxon/Mobil/chevron/texaco buys out the company/lab and shut this project down.

capitalism is the new communism.

[K1A @ Jun 16th 2007 2:19AM]

how can it be bought out if its a government lab?? great news btw. go sugar!!

[ssleb @ Jun 16th 2007 3:41AM]

is HMF a commonly used monomer? if so, then it's got to be an exceptionally strong ester bond. if it's not a common monomer, then forgive me if i'm skeptical, but esters are not exactly known to have the strongest chemical bonds (at the ester that it).

[James Sonne @ Jun 16th 2007 9:04AM]

The HMF is oxidized to 2,5-furandicarboxylic acid, which then replaces terephthalic acid in the production of poly-esters. It acts as a diester bond forming monomer, just as terephthalic acid currently does, it is equivalent strength. Also, both monomers are aromatic, making the (lack of) reactivity nearly equivalent.

I highly doubt that the enthalpy of this molecule is much greater than current biofuels, and the production of it from sugar makes its scarcity just as big a problem as current biofuels (i.e. there is not enough land on the earth to grow enough crops for high enough yields to power all of the cars that are currently on the road). The added cost of producing this sugar derivative instead of using current, less complicated biofuels, also seems to be a negative.

Sugars are obviously not where our new fuel will come from. Heck, your body only gets 5% of its energy from the breakdown of sugars!

I don't understand why this made the media, except people think it's the new aspirin. Made from the bark of everyday plants, can be used to make clothes, burn as fuel, heal anemia, and strip paint!

[Adeel @ Jun 16th 2007 3:46AM]

ummm hasn't this technology been around for some time now?
you get cellulose from plants and break it down to glucose. from here you can produce many polymers and also produce ethanol which can be used as a fuel source in cars. In fact this was put into practice in the 1970s in Brazil but discontinued in the early 1990s due to low oil prices and ethanol as a fuel was seen as too expensive to produce.

[NakedOldGuy @ Jun 16th 2007 4:08AM]

gasoline has somewhere in the range of 1000 times the energy density of glucose. So have fun converting an entire acre of corn into one gallon of gasoline.

[James Sonne @ Jun 16th 2007 9:05AM]

Per season.

[Karim @ Jun 17th 2007 12:47PM]

This Wired article says that current biofuel (ethanol) yields are around 400 gallons per acre:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.10/ethanol.html

and the author is optimistically expecting that to increase to over 2,000 gallons per acre.

Wikipedia has a different table showing yields of only 18 gallons of biodiesel per acre of corn, but 113 gallons for peanuts, 635 gallons for palm oil, and 10,000 gallons per acre of algae:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiesel

Of course this is not taking into account energy density differences. I just wanted to suggest that "1 gallon per acre" might be off by a few orders of magnitude ;-)

If (as was suggested in another comment) the feedstock is cellulose, we're not talking about acres of corn, so much using all the stalks and leaves Kellogg's doesn't put in your cereal bowl. :-)

Corn stover (corn stalks and leaves) is a third of the solid waste produced in the US! And 90% of it is currently going to waste, just left in the field. If we ever figure out how to cost-effectively turn it into fuel, future generations may be surprised that we ever actually ATE the stuff. :-)

[Quacktastic @ Jun 16th 2007 8:08AM]

"a primary building block for fuel and polyesters . . . . "

Seems to indicate that polyesters may be capable of blowing up more than your social life.

[humpty @ Jun 16th 2007 8:38AM]

The diversion of corn stock to ethanol plants have already driven up the cost of corn.. not this? The increased use of biomass has to come from somewhere.. and its the food chain.

[SigmaProjects.org @ Jun 16th 2007 8:43AM]

I'm all for ridding our dependency on fossil fuels, but corn prices are already hitting new heights. And as another person above said it takes a huge amount of base product to be efficient. But, something must be done soon before the planet dies.

[Cascavel @ Jun 16th 2007 9:11AM]

Some posters seem to be missing the real point, which is that the process can use cellulosic material as a feedstock. The cellulose in corn stems, sugar cane process waste etc. is not currently used "in the food chain" so the food-vs-fuel and price arguments are null.

If the process can be used on a commercial scale we would have biofuel nirvana, but these lab-scale pilots rarely seem to make it to the real world.

I live in Brazil, so my car already runs on ethanol from sugar cane :)

[Júlio Coutinho @ Jun 16th 2007 9:24AM]

That´s ACTUALLY OLD NEWS... For some time already "Plastics" (i.e. Polymers) are being produced out from Sugar in Brazil. It is called PHB. It is produced in Industrial scale since around 2004 and itis exported to US, Europe, China...

The adicional advantage of PHB is that it is Biodegradable, in other words, it does not affect nature before (produced with renewable resources) nor after (no plastic trash around).

By the way... Who invented the airplane?

[Tyler @ Jun 16th 2007 10:10AM]

James Sonne:

Actually, all your body's fuel is ultimately derived from glucose. Your organic is great, but go back to biochem...you've got to have glucose to make ATP. And glucose comes from three sources: carbohydrates, lipids, and proteins.

And the ideal diet, if you're coming from that angle, consists of 55-60% of total caloric intake from carbohydrates.

[James Sonne @ Jun 16th 2007 12:31PM]

The oxidation of glucose, the most efficient of all sugars, results in only a couple ATP and some NADH. This oxidation is equivalent to the oxidation (burning) of fuels that occur within a combustion (oxidation) engine. That was the analogy I was making.

And actually, lipids and proteins can be oxidized directly without the need for gluconeogenesis. Also, your body can switch to the breakdown of ketones instead of glucose (ever smelled a diabetic's breath? Or maybe someone's that's on the Atkins diet --- which is the same as being diabetic, but just dietarily and not metabolically --- hint of the smell of nail polish, anyone?).

[fredouil @ Jun 16th 2007 10:28AM]

i think it is worth to repeat since many poster are missing the point :

the sugar is "generated" from cellulose !!!! which is a fantastic breakthrough, that mean for example that instead of using only the sugar cane, you can use the whole plant and thus getting hundreds time more fuel.

[James Sonne @ Jun 16th 2007 4:02PM]

That conversion is trivial, and far from new.

[Eric Whitney @ Jun 16th 2007 2:31PM]

James Sonne

Thank you for the technical chemical information.
However, I think you may have missed the inevitable connections of this story and a few others posted today. Take a step back and look at the larger implications: "Scientists convert glucose into fuel and polyesters" With a bit of collaboration, tomorrows most intrigging post will read like this:

"Horribly dressed wooden robots convert glucose into fuel and play with themselves"


we should, of course, welcome their arrival immediatley.

[Wing @ Jun 17th 2007 12:50PM]

Just to set a few things straight, a few people may be wondering why go the HMF route to get fuels if you already have glucose since glucose is very easily converted to ethanol or other biofuel. (think fermentation) However, the HMF is is actually a secondary reaction of converting cellulose/biowaste to glucose depending in the method of conversion (typically acid hydrolysis is very efficient at this), however glucose will degrade under these conditions to HMF which practically becomes a wast material after separation from the glucose stream. Now that there is a use for the HMF, methods like acid hydrolysis of biowaste cellulose becomes more economically viable than other traditional methods.

[Tom @ Jun 17th 2007 3:20PM]

now the saying "eat my shorts" is suddenly appetizing.