Replacing Non-Renewable Carbon with Bio-derived Alternatives

Department of Chemical & Environmental Engineering Seminar 

"Replacing Non-Renewable Carbon with Bio-derived Alternatives"

Andrew D. Sutton
Los Alamos National Laboratory
Inorganic, Isotope & Actinide Chemistry

In attempts to “replace the whole barrel” and drastically reduce our petroleum dependency, it’s important to consider what a barrel of oil is used for. In the US, 76 % is used to make fuel and 16 % is used for chemicals, but with both markets having similar economic value a typical initial focus is typically the small volume, higher profit chemicals market. However, in order to have the most effect on environmental impacts (such as reducing current CO-2 emissions), the larger fuel market must not be neglected as a long-term focus.

Our approach is to rationally design molecules and use group contribution methods to identify fuel candidates prior to actual cetane and octane testing. To that end we have been developing strategies to use small bio-derived molecules to construct more complicated carbon skeletons with varying degrees of functionalization we can convert between the functional groups using simple catalytic approaches to produce molecules with promising fuel properties. While a large proportion of biomass to chemicals/ fuels work concentrates on producing hydrocarbons, there are numerous instances where over-defunctionalizing is not necessary and in fact is detrimental to the final properties and in the process consumes more energy and raw materials. By understanding this structure-function relationship we hope to synthesize molecules and molecule classes that have the optimum properties for specific applications.

Wednesday, September 19, 2018, at 10:30AM
Becton Seminar Room
MC 035
Refreshments at 10:00AM