Nanotechnology’s role in next generation biofuel production

Years of engineering research and design, together with uncounted billions of dollars from government and industry, went into the development of the modern petroleum industry. It would be unreasonable to expect that we can replace this industry with greener alternatives without a similarly expansive and sustained effort. Point in case is a recently published roadmap to ‘Next Generation Hydrocarbon Biorefineries’ that outlines a number of novel process pathways for biofuels production based on scientific and engineering proofs of concept demonstrated in laboratories around the world. The key conclusion from this (U.S.-centric) report is that “while the U.S. has made a significant investment in technologies focusing on breaking the biological barriers to biofuels, principally ethanol, there has not been a commensurate investment in the research needed to break the chemical and engineering barriers to hydrocarbon fuels such as gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel.”
This statement of course holds true not only for biofuels but for any kind of green energy technology. The production of ethanol from corn (about 95% of ethanol in the U.S. is produced from field corn whereas Brazil, the world leader in ethanol production, uses sugar cane) has come under intense scrutiny and discussion for its potential environmental and economic side effects (see fore example Panel Sees Problems in Ethanol Production or read the UN report on sustainable bioenergy – pdf download, 1 MB). Advances in agriculture and biotechnology have made it possible to inexpensively produce lignocellulosic biomass (plant biomass that is composed of cellulose and lignin) at costs that are significantly lower (about $15 per barrel of oil energy equivalent) than crude oil.

The key bottleneck for lignocellulosic-derived biofuels is the lack of technology for the efficient conversion of biomass into liquid fuels. Advances in nanotechnology have given us an unprecedented ability to understand and control chemistry at the molecular scale, which promises to accelerate the development of biomass-to-fuels production technologies.

Nanowerk