You probably know that there’s a problem with petrol. It’s made from crude oil dug out of the ground, and at some point in the future, supplies will run out. So researchers are busy looking at ways to make petrol cheaply from other sources that won’t run out.

Now researchers in the Netherlands have used sawdust to make chemicals similar to petrol.  Petrol is made up of hydrocarbon chains – that’s long molecules of chains of carbon atoms with hydrogen atoms joined on at the side. They can be added to petrol or used to make plastics.

The researchers realised that cellulose – found in all non-edible plant parts of wood, straw, grass, cotton and old paper – contains carbon chains. My colleague Beau Op de Beeck developed a new method to derive these hydrocarbon chains from cellulose,” explains Professor Bert Sels of the Catholic University of Leuven.

“We have also built a chemical reactor in our lab: we feed sawdust collected from a sawmill into the reactor and add a catalyst – a substance that sets off and speeds the chemical reaction. With the right temperature and pressure, it takes about half a day to convert the cellulose in the wood shavings into saturated hydrocarbon chains, or alkanes,” says another of the researchers, Bert Lagrain. (Alkanes are hydrocarbon chains with as many hydrogen atoms as possible attached to each carbon atom in the chain.)

The product isn’t yet petrol (that requires another simple step) but even without that step it can be added to petrol to reduce the amount of standard petrol needed to fuel a car. (Alcohol is added to petrol in some countries, such as France and Sweden, to do the same thing.)

The product can also be used to produce ethylene, propylene and benzene (all alkenes – hydrocarbons with fewer hydrogen atoms than alkanes). These are used to make plastic, rubber, insulation foam, nylon, and so on.

Professor Sels says another great advantage of using cellulose is that it grows everywhere. Farmers won’t have to choose between growing food or cellulose because all plants grown for food also produce cellulose in their non-edible parts.

http://www.kuleuven.be/english/news/researchers-turn-sawdust-into-gasoline