Hydrogen, ethanol and even compressed air all have the shrink-wrapped sheen of the bright, green future. But gasoline? At $1 per gallon?
Researchers at UMass Amherst recently published a new method of refining hydrocarbons from cellulose, paving the way to turn wood scraps into gasoline, diesel fuel, Tupperware—anything, essentially, that’s normally refined from petroleum.
[...]
Using a catalyst commonly employed in the petroleum industry, Huber and his colleagues heated small amounts of cellulose very quickly for a matter of seconds before cooling it, producing a high-octane liquid similar to gasoline. “The temperature window is very critical,” Huber says. If you heat too slowly, you produce mainly coke—elemental carbon residue. If you heat too fast, you make mainly vapors. The sweet spot, about 1000 degrees per second, transfers roughly half the cellulose’s energy into hydrocarbons. “If we can get 100 percent yield, we estimate the cost to be about a dollar per gallon,” Huber says. “Right now we’re at 50 percent. Can we get 100 percent? I don’t know. Hopefully we’ll bump those numbers up.” (emphasis mine - DC)
Like most things in Popular Mechanics, it certainly sounds promising on paper. At worst, it sounds like it'll fit in a similar niche as the coal-to-liquids technology pioneered by a couple of countries that had a lot more coal than oil available to them. At best, it might be just the thing to permanently eliminate scarcity - if they can get production costs down into the $2-3 range (not sure what it is at 50% efficiency), that'll serve as an upper limit for future gas costs.
Either way... between this and biodiesel, we're living in very interesting times.
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