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Scientists Attempt to Replace Crude Oil With Sugars
amigoro writes with a link to the Press Esc blog, discussing a possible replacement for crude oil in plastics, fuels, and other industrial uses. The post outlines findings to be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Science. Essentially, researchers at the Institute for Interfacial Catalysis are attempting to process the sugars in plant matter into an oil-like compound, a daunting challenge. "Glucose, in plant starch and cellulose, is nature's most abundant sugar. 'But getting a commercially viable yield of HMF from glucose has been very challenging,' Zhang said. 'In addition to low yield until now, we always generate many different byproducts,' including levulinic acid, making product purification expensive and uncompetitive with petroleum-based chemicals. Zhang, lead author and former post doc Haibo Zhao, and colleagues John Holladay and Heather Brown, all from PNNL, were able to coax HMF yields upward of 70 percent from glucose and nearly 90 percent from fructose while leaving only traces of acid impurities."
What about the guys who wanted to convert dead people to fuel?
This guy's the limit!
Does that much crude go into plastics? I figured that the majority of oil was going to fuels. Would it be better for these guys to work with the current projects that are turning sugars into fuel rather than plastics?
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
NatureWorks have been producing plastics from corn for quite a few years now.
Their food containers look just like traditional ones and i've got a few pairs of Teko Ingeo socks that are really comfortable.
It's certainly an interesting field
...as inputs for ALL our industries!
If we could wrap our heads around the idea of conservation, I think we'd be a lot better off.
Unfortunately, since we've defined consumption as economic success, preaching conservation ends up sounding like austerity.
hemp.
what were we talking about again?
Plants that grow plastic... http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/459126.stm
If we could wrap our heads around the idea of conservation, I think we'd be a lot better off.
Conservation is good, but doesn't solve the problem. If 4/5th of the world weren't needing to be brought up to our standards, and the population was static or decreasing, and oil wasn't going to run out, and our oil purchases weren't funding the guys who kill our troops, and we didn't have greenhouse effects to worry about, conservation would be all we need.
Conservation makes all those problems a little bit better. But we need to solve them completely. And until we can get them solved we should absolutely conserve as much as we can to decrease the time until implementation of a real solution.
Actually, I think the best plan is to save oil for very remote vehicle operation and plastics, such that we can cut our production down to the point where domestic sources are more than enough, so using sugar for plastics is probably the last thing that needs addressing.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Umm... Correct me please...
:)
Suger based polymers... This is a statement that I've been told is in the screws and plates used to hold my son's head together. (He had a major surgery and my daughter just had the same this past wednesday.) Anyways, when I hear "Suger based polymers", I assumed pastic from sugar. Isn't "polymer" a fancy way of saying plastic? The side benifit for my children are that the screws/plates are then reabsorbed by the skull as it grows/heals.
So this Sugar/Plastic would A) reserve fuels and B) biodegrade better?
Dibs on a name, I call it Slastar or Slastic... (c) 2007, me.
--- Relax, that mass muderer is just trying to reduce our carbon footprint, one fetus at a time...
Obviously we should be conserving energy.
Obviously we should be creating less CO2.
And obviously there isn't going to be one single solution to this mess.
It seems to me it's a lot better to be using and burning something renewable and localizable that actual absorbs CO2 before harvesting rather than something nonrenewable and poisonous that has to be shipped halfway around the world. This research could very well help. Just like conservation helps. Just like solar and wind and wave and other power sources will help.
Personally I'm sick of people ranting that some alternative source of energy (or plastic) or conservation or whatever isn't worthwhile because it's not going to solve every problem all by itself. Be serious! It's going to take work on a lot of different fronts to fix this mess. There will not be one magic solution.
Uh, begging your pardon, but that's simply not true. CO2 is only produce by burning things that contain carbon. Burning hydrogen, for example, produces water.
GreyPoopon
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Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
Burning something that was grown to be burned is the very essence of "carbon-neutral", not the credit-buying al gore approach.
The plant takes in CO2 when it grows and gives it out when it's burned.
Hey smart boy, what do you think people's metabolisms do with the fuel? I'll tell you, they burn it (in a controlled fashion) and release (gasp) CO2!
The advantage of biofuel techniques is we are releasing CO2 that has been recently removed from the atmosphere versus large sums of it that has been stored away for millions of years (oil). That is a profound difference because its sustainable, rather than using up limited resources at an unsustainable rate and changing our environment.
Other than that, I agree with your general statement that biofuel is overrated and alternative fuels are underutilized and that we can do better.
...I'm going to try it out by putting some sugar in my gas tank. If it works well I'll increase the amount. With a little luck I'll be able to save lots of money on gas. :-)
We all know that any and all technologies that can be used to reduce our consumption of oil eventually vanishes, or the people sell out to big oil. This will be no different.
I once worked at a place where my boss rediscovered the formula for dynamite. They were trying to do a selenium assay on vitamin pills. RDA for selenium is micrograms per day and for the atomic absorption test you have to dissolve the sample in acid so the spectrometer can spray it into a flame and check absorption/emission wavelengths of elements in the sample. But if you dissolve a vitamin pill in acid the selenium becomes too dilute to measure.
He was basically trying to liquify a multivitamin, which has all kinds of crap in it. Generally you use a mixture of concentrated sulfuric and nitric acids to liquify something. The pills wouldn't dissolve when he tried digestion on an open burner, because the temperature at 1 atmosphere won't get high enough. They make steel digestion bombs for this kind of situation. They're like soup cans with stainless steel armor one inch thick around a ceramic liner inside. If the temperature exceeds 50 atmospheres a little safety valve on top pops to relieve the pressure. So he decided to buy 5 of these things, to let the pressure and temperature rise without losing any contents of the five sample tablets as he dissolved them under concentrated acids.
This turned out to be a cardinal error. The tablets had a binder made of sodium benzoate. If you heat benzoate at high temperature and pressure under concentrated sulfuric and nitric acid, it turns into trinitrobenzoate which dissolves in water all right but is also a class A explosive. So they put the five vitamin tablets in the acids, sealed the bombs, and put them in the oven at 105 C which they actually had set up in a conference room where people would write up experiments. I was across the hall with a clear line of sight to the oven when the first bomb exploded inside. It sounded like someone took 5000 dinner plates and smashed them on the floor all at once, and the oven turned into a pile of kitty litter and silicate and asbestos and the conference room filled up with brown nitrogen dioxide. Then two more exploded and fired off in different directions. One penetrated the HR office next door (they moved upstairs the next week) and one buried itself in the wall of the conference room while people were still running outside. (The other two were duds.)
I almost got killed by a multivitamin that day. You know, you live your life, day in and day out, and you don't realize how fragile life is until one day you almost get killed by an exploding vitamin tablet. In an interstellar burst I am back to save the universe.
Not being a native English speaker, of course my boss gets on the phone with 911 and tells them that his bombs exploded.