UW-Madison is in the midst of implementing an important initiative to reduce the energy consumption on campus and to promote grassroots efforts to motivate the community.
UW-Madison Chemical and biological engineering professor James Dumesic and his team are taking the grassroots initiative literally. They've developed a process that creates transportation fuels from the sugar in plant material.
The new fuels look surprisingly like the gasoline and diesel fuels used in vehicles today. That's because the new fuels are identical at the molecular level to their petroleum-based counterparts. The only difference is where they come from.
This new process was unveiled in a paper, published in the Sept. 18 online version of Science."" It explains how sugar is converted into molecules that can be efficiently ""upgraded"" into gasoline, diesel and jet fuel.
Ed Kunkes, a UW-Madison graduate student in the chemical and biological engineering department, ran the reactions converting the sugar solutions into the liquid that gets upgraded into gasoline and diesel fuel.
""We started this project maybe back in 2006, but the fundamental discovery that led to this process was found back in 2002
