Researchers Use 'Old' Chemistry to Convert Coal to Diesel Fuel
Posted on: Friday, 14 April 2006, 00:50 CDT
(RedOrbit) Researchers at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, have developed a way to convert carbon sources, such as coal, into diesel fuel.
In collaboration with researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, professor Alan Goldman of Rutgers explained that the breakthrough technology employs a pair of catalytic chemical reactions that operate in tandem, one of which obtained the 2005 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
"The key to energy independence in the next five decades is Fischer-Tropsch (FT) chemistry, amended and enhanced," said Goldman, a professor in the department of chemistry and chemical biology at Rutgers.
Some products of FT chemistry are useful (low-weight and the high-weight products) while others (medium-weight products) are not. Gas and diesel fuel constitute useful low and high-weight products respectively.
"The problem - the greatest inefficiency of the process - is that you also wind up with a substantial quantity of medium-weight products that are not useful and you are stuck with them," Goldman said. "What we are now able to do with our new catalysts is something no one else has done before. We take all these undesirable medium-weight substances and convert them to the useful higher- and lower-weight products."
"With our new catalysts," says Goldman, "one can generate productive, clean burning fuels with Fischer-Tropsch, economically and at unsurpassed levels of efficiency."
This discovery is reported in the April 14 issue of the journal Science.
By Karen Ventii of RedOrbit from Wire reports
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User Comments (1)
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Posted by Daniel on 07/25/2008, 13:56 Can the "waste" be used to make building materials? what is it and is it caustic? |
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