Midland Reporter-Telegram

An unquenchable thirst for gasoline has joined with the realization the world's crude oil supplies are growing very tight and both have combined with growing concern about the planet's environmental health and high oil and gasoline prices to spur interest in alternative fuels.

"Many companies, particularly the larger petrochemical companies like Shell and Chevron are putting money into research leading to other fuels," observed Dr. Mike Robinson, the Ellen and Bill Noel Distinguished Professor for Energy Research and the Chemistry Chair at the University of Texas of the Permian Basin.

Robinson recently received a grant under which Chevron Technology Ventures will provide about $600,000 for the next two years for research to establish polyols as an intermediate platform from hydrolysis and hydrogenation of biomass carbohydrates. Major companies like Chevron, he said, are supporting him and other researchers to move forward development of alternative fuels. It is just the latest grant he has received since he began working on producing fuels from biomass in the 1990s, receiving his first patent in 1996.

The work he and his students will now be doing, he said, is in the engineering stage of the process of deriving fuel from biomass and will be to refine the process, making it more efficient and economical. He and his students will develop methods to selectively hydrolyze and purify carbohydrates to remove naturally occurring trace impurities, leaving purified materials that will allow for a long-lived catalyst in the hydrogenation reaction to make polyols.

"This is the first in a couple of steps to make fuel," Robinson explained. "First is fractionating the biomass into carbohydrates, which comprises about three-quarters of biomass. Second is the lignin or aeromatics, a certain type of glue that holds wood together. Our main focus is on the carbohydrates and converting them into polyols. The next step after that is to take the polyols and convert them directly into hydrocarbons -- gasoline, jet fuel and diesel."

Current discussions about alternative energy tend to focus on energy sources to generate electricity, but "75 to 80 percent of the nation's needs are liquid fuels," he said. "Even if you have nuclear power, you need liquid fuels. We need convenience fuels; we use a lot of liquid fuels, but they're not efficient. It would be hard to fly a plane without liquid fuel, even ethanol. With ethanol, you'd go only two-thirds of the way you would with gasoline. Ethanol burns clean, but it doesn't have the same BTU as gasoline."

Biomass is solid, not a convenience fuel, Robinson said, but research is developing an economic process to liquefy that biomass, yet it's a process that needs tweaking, particularly in finding ways to protect the catalyst and make sure it has a long life. He likened it to a set of dominos and researchers need to make sure that first domino stays up.

The catalysts used are precious metals that are sensitive to being poisoned. Only small amounts of the metals are used, but they are expensive -- "which is why they're called precious metals," Robinson said. And it doesn't take a large amount of poison -- iron or sulfur -- to destroy the catalyst, he added.

Robinson said he prefers wood as opposed to grassy or stalk crops because grassy-like biomass contains a lot of ash and sulfur proteins and their use can impact the food chain "like we're seeing now with corn. We want to use wood or woody plants -- waste lumber -- because they have 10 times less of the poisonous materials."

He is pleased to tackle such an important problem and knows the results of the research could have a long-lasting impact. He also sees it as good for the Permian Basin and a way to show that "even though we're not a Level One research institution, we can still do significant research at a small institution."

Robinson also sees the project as a way to motivate students and get them interested in science by engaging them in research that they're interested in and makes them feel they're making a valuable contribution, he said.

In fact it was his students that helped change his career path from research synthesizing anti-cancer drugs to synthesizing transportation fuels. He recalled that, back in the 1980s, he challenged an organic chemistry class he was teaching to address issues involving ethanol as they discussed their concerns about the nation's dependence on foreign oil. No one accepted the challenge, he said, but as he left the class, "I told myself I'd come up with some good ideas."