The White House released a plan for eliminating greenhouse gas emissions from transportation. Conducting research to help aid this decarbonization plan are University of Wisconsin researchers. Tim Donahue, director of the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center says their work started in 2007 and it will take years of additional research to reach a point of producing enough advanced biofuels but he knows we’ll get there.
“We are working on projects that would allow us to make transportation fuels with lower net greenhouse gas emissions,” explains Donahue. “The way we do that is by using excess crop material, non food crop material, as the source of those fuels as replacements or supplements to fossil fuels.”
Donahue and other researchers are looking at the whole process of decarbonization of the transportation sector. Everything from what crops we would grow, how we can make them more productive, how we can stimulate root development so that they store more carbon below ground, and where we would grow them in the United States.
The University has published over 2,500 papers, filed over 250 patent applications that have led to 100 licenses and five startup companies, and trained over 1,000 young scientists that are now out in the workplace.
The key research findings include how to modify the cell walls of plants to make them easier to process without having a negative impact on the yield and new ways to deconstruct that material that has a lower energy so that the processing of the biomass would be more cost effective. They also are developing new systems to make fuels that could be upgraded to mix with jet fuel to be sustainable aviation.
Donahue adds, “Switchgrass is one of our targeted energy crops. We have a lot of interest in switchgrass for a variety of reasons. It’s a very productive crop that can be grown on acreage in different climate regions in the United States, it’s a productive crop and it’s a perennial crop.”
He says they are targeting fuels that would be considered multi-engine fuels that would replace the hydrocarbons that we currently get from a barrel of oil. These would be fuels that could be used in the aviation sector, marine and shipping diesel engines, and they would be fuels that would replace the gasoline in an automobile.
The fuel they are working to create will be clean burning fuel. It will still release CO2 but the CO2 that’s produced during the combustion will be CO2 that came from the plants that were grown the previous year versus fossil fuels.
“We’re basically recycling the carbon, taking it out of the atmosphere, storing it in green plants in one growing season and then making fuel out of it and producing it back into the atmosphere,” says Donahue. “So the net greenhouse gas emissions from these types of fuels are much lower than from fossil fuels.”
There are other programs that Donahue is working on such as one that aims to see what can be done to take abundant, renewable raw materials from the dairy industry and convert them into fuels and chemicals. He believes that by doing so, he can generate extra value for farmers.
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