New Energy Source

Harvesting our energy needs from the fields, rather than pumping fossil fuels from beneath them, has long been a green dream – and a bountiful reality, recently, for many Midwest farmers. Unlike oil and gas, biofuels hold out the promise a carbon-neutral fuel for the tank, which could help knock global warming on the head. But that promise has yet to be fully realized. Biofuels today tend to follow the easier paths to releasing energy – such as fermenting the simple sugars in corn, to produce bioethanol – which leaves much waste untapped.

The holy grail of biofuels would be for 'whole plant-mass conversion' - turning leaves, husks, stems and stalks into useful products that can replace petroleum. That's the potential this concept offers, with a fresh approach to unlocking the energy trapped in the woody parts of plants – cellulose, which bulks out around 70% of their mass. While others have taken on cellulose with an armory of expensive enzymes or difficult-to-master microbes, this team has kept it simple.

Using relatively cheap solvents, at low temperatures, they avoid the difficult task of splitting out the sugars from cellulose. Instead their reactors produce furans, chemicals that can be turned – with just a few tricks up the chemist's sleeve – into fuels, drugs and plastics. The team believes their process, shoe-horned into ongoing biodiesel plants, could push the production of useful products to 100% of 'plant-matter in' – all without producing planet-warming CO2. And not only plants are gobbled up by their reactor; municipal waste could be turned into a useful energy-source too. 'Waste-not want-not' could finally become the motto of the next generation of biofuels.

About the finalist:

Mark Mascal is a Professor of Chemistry at the University of California Davis. He is a synthetic organic chemist by training, and his principal interest in the area of sustainable energy is the investigation of chemical approaches to the deconstruction of waste biomass to produce renewable chemicals and new generations of motor fuels. He received his Ph.D. in organic chemistry from Imperial College London, and did postdoctoral research in the laboratory of Nobel laureate Jean-Marie Lehn at the University of Strasbourg, France. Thereafter he worked as an academic at the University of Nottingham, England, and was appointed in 2000 as a visiting professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UCLA. He took up his current position at UC Davis in 2003.