Glycerol

Chemical waste doesn't have to be bad news in the new green economy:

Oxford researchers have discovered a new way to produce the biofuel methanol from the industrial waste chemical glycerol.

Methanol is useful either as a fuel on its own or in biodiesel manufacture. It is also used widely in industrial chemistry. At the moment ninety per cent of the world's methanol is produced from natural gas, but the new process bypases the need for fossil fuels.

‘Essentially, this is a way of getting methanol ‘for free’ from biomass,’ said Edman Tsang of Oxford's Department of Chemistry, the main inventor behind the new method.

‘Around 350,000 tonnes of glycerol are incinerated in the US each year, and converting this to methanol gives you a portable store of energy, and potentially an economically viable new biofuel business.’

The big advantage of the process is that it's direct – cutting out costly processing steps – and it works at a low temperature and low pressure: a relatively mild 100 degrees Celsius at 20 bar of pressure.

‘When we say the process in clean, we mean that the catalyst is very selective. The exclusive product is methanol, so little additional processing is required,' Edman explains. Earlier this year, his research in new catalytic materials identified a supported precious metal which efficiently converts glycerol to methanol.

Isis Innovation, the technology transfer company for Oxford University, has patented the technology.

Pete Wilton, www.ox.ac.uk/media/science_blog