Through a two-stage process for turning biomass-derived sugar into 2,5-dimethylfuran (DMF), University of Wisconsin-Madison Professor James Dumesic and colleagues have been able to transform sugar into a liquid transportation fuel that has a 40 percent greater energy density than ethanol.

According to Professor James Dumesic:

"Currently, ethanol is the only renewable liquid fuel produced on a large scale. But ethanol ... has relatively low energy density, evaporates readily, and can become contaminated by absorption of water from the atmosphere. It also requires an energy-intensive distillation process to separate the fuel from water

Not only does dimethylfuran have higher energy content, it also is not soluble in water and therefore cannot become contaminated by absorbing water from the atmosphere.

DMF is stable in storage and, in the evaporation stage of its production, consumes one-third of the energy required to evaporate a solution of ethanol produced by fermentation for biofuel applications."

The process has been reported in June 21 issue of the journal Nature.

Find more details from the full report.

[In Photo: Yuriy Roman Leshkov is holding a reactor used to carry out the first step in our 2-step process to convert fructose to DMF. This first step is the conversion of fructose to HMF. The reactor contains two phases. The organic phase on the top (butanol) is used to extract the HMF from the reactive aqueous phase on the bottom containing the fructose reactant and the acid catalyst. Credit: Image courtesy of University of Wisconsin-Madison]