CHEAP, CLEAN, RENEWABLE NON-POLLUTING FUEL FROM PLANT WASTES AND UNIVERSITY SCIENCE

For decades, Americans have searched for a fuel that’s cheaper, cleaner to burn, and less dependent on foreign trouble-spots than petroleum. Now that $50-a-barrel oil is making the quest for a petroleum substitute more urgent than ever, we’re finding that fuel right here in the USA in plant wastes of all kinds—from sawdust to cornstalks and wild grass.

These plant wastes are called biomass, and biomass contains lots of the most common molecule on earth—cellulose. Just like starch, cellulose consists of glucose molecules, but it’s all packed tight so that trees and grass can stand up on their own. If those molecules could be broken open, the plant wastes could be converted to liquid fuel, speeding up the process by which similar wastes naturally become petroleum over millions of years.

At the University of California at Riverside, the Center for Environmental Research and Technology has received a contract from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to demonstrate how biomass can be converted into wood alcohol—methanol—a clean-burning liquid fuel that can be used in cars and trucks, electrical power generators, and factories. The UC Riverside center will be building an experimental facility that will test the “Hynol Process” to turn wastes from trees and plants into gas, then into steam, and then into liquid methanol.

If this works, then the dream of inexpensive,
renewable and non-polluting fuel will come closer to reality—thanks to federally funded university science.

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