The Warwick Photoemission Facility and the Departments of Chemistry & Physics have recently contributed to a study headed by Prof. Lynne Macaskie (University of Birmingham) to "upconvert" cellulosic waste in an effort to develop new carbon-neutral biofuels.

The climatic impact of atmospheric CO2, a legacy of the use of fossil fuels, is now accepted and stricter worldwide environmental legislation has promoted global interest in developing carbon-neutral fuels from biomass. Biomass sources include wood, plants, agricultural and energy crops, aquatic plants and food processing wastes. Although biomass-derived fuels offer a renewable and sustainable potential alternative to fossil fuels biomass conversion technologies are usually needed.

Biogas involves microbial fermentation of feedstock hydrolyzate generated enzymatically or thermochemically. The latter also produces 5-hydroxymethyl furfural (5-HMF) which can be catalytically upgraded to 2, 5-dimethyl furan (DMF), a “drop in fuel”. 5-HMF was upgraded using bacterially-supported Pd/Ru catalysts, namely the sulfate-reducing bacterium (SRB) Desulfovibrio desulfuricans.

This work has been published recently in Frontiers in Microbiology 10 (2019) 970.

https://doi.org/10.3389/fmicb.2019.00970

(The figure shows SEM images of bacteria loaded with Ru and Pt which supports the catalytic process)