Creating renewable gasoline

The schematic diagram of reaction and distillation apparatus, and the appearance of polyhydroxybutyrate, light-oil and heavy-oil. Image courtesy of HIMB.

Creating gasoline and biodiesel from readily available microbial organisms may sound too good to be true, but that is exactly what researchers at the Hawaiʻi Natural Energy Institute (HNEI) are doing. A new one-pot process is described in a recent publication by HNEI Postdoctoral Fellow Shimin Kang and Researcher Jian Yu.

“As we refine this process, we will be able to simplify and bring down the cost of converting renewable feedstock to commercially viable transportation fuel,” said researcher Kang.

Read more about it in the UH System News and at ScienceDirect.