A new report published by the National Academy of Sciences, offers a cost effective way to make biofuels that can be directly substituted for gasoline, diesel fuel, or jet fuel with few if any changes to the engines.
Depending on the source of those biofuels, greenhouse gas emissions would be reduced from as little as 40% all the way up to 96%.
We know how to make ethanol from plants but the three step process which is used for the conversion makes it costly.
Using the latest advances in catalysis and process development, researchers have created a conversion process that combines all three steps and lowers costs significantly.
The one-step process is known as Consolidated Alcohol Dehydration and Oligomerization, or CADO.
They have also created a computer analysis tool known at GREET, which stands for Greenhouse Gases, Regulated Emissions, and Energy use in Transportation.
The program simulates energy use and environmental outputs of various vehicle and fuel systems and has been used 40,000 times by researchers around the world.
The new effective cost of ethanol versus gasoline will be around $4.00 a gallon.
In order to move towards more sustainable development, we will need fuels that can generate fewer emissions and that are economically feasible, till the day we replace the billions of Internal combustion engines in use in the world today and replace them with motors powered by sunlight or wind or ocean waves.
Reference- Clean Technica, Futurism