You really can make transportation fuel from just about anything. Here’s a tour of the more recent, unusual and promising sources for next-generation gasoline and diesel.
Algae
It’s green, it’s crude and it’s one of the more promising “drop-in” fuel alternatives out there. Sapphire Energy, San Diego, Calif., creates its “green crude” from oil produced by algae after it absorbs carbon dioxide and sunlight. Sapphire then refines this crude, which is said to be molecularly similar to conventional light sweet crude, into gasoline, diesel or jet fuel. With gas prices at 10-year lows, Sapphire has since diversified into other industries, but it still plans to keep a New Mexico plant churning out biofuels.
Scotch Whisky
Martin Tangney, director of the Biofuel Research Centre at Napier University in Edinburgh, Scotland, has figured out how to turn the byproducts of Scotch whisky distillation into the alcohol biobutanol. The biofuel reportedly contains more energy than corn- or sugarcane-based ethanol, and almost as much as gasoline. A production facility is being built in Scotland and should be operational by 2018.
Natural Gas
San Francisco-based Siluria Technologies has received backing from Saudi Aramco, the largest oil company in the world, to refine a process that turns natural gas into gasoline. Siluria harnesses a catalyst to combine methane molecules from natural gas into the hydrocarbon ethylene. This can then be processed with other catalysts to form gasoline, diesel or jet fuel. Last year, Siluria started its first demonstration plant in Texas, and it’s planning to open commercial-scale plants by 2018.
Beer
If Scotch whisky isn’t to your liking, you could always make fuel from beer, as one New Zealand brewery has. DB Export, based in Manukau, produces DB Export Brewtroleum by extracting ethanol from yeast that is left over from the beer-brewing process. According to the NZ Herald, the biofuel is now being sold in a 10% 98-octane gasoline blend at 60 Gull stations throughout New Zealand. As a brewery spokesperson told the news site, “We’re helping [New Zealanders] save the world by doing what they enjoy best: drinking beer."
Water and Carbon Dioxide
In 2015, Audi and German energy tech firm Sunfire announced they had created their first batch of “e-diesel,” created from water and carbon dioxide. To make the fuel, the team heats steam until it breaks into oxygen and hydrogen. The hydrogen is combined with pressurized, high-temperature carbon dioxide to form “blue crude.” This can then be refined into diesel or gasoline. A pilot plant is producing test batches of e-diesel, although its current economics are—and may always be—a barrier to scaling it up for mass production.
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