Grant: Strategic Projects Supplemental Competition

This project aims at producing premium grade gasoline and precursors of plastics and synthetic fibres such as ethylene and propylene, from cellulosic biomass. The potential raw materials include wood, wood residues, agricultural and municipal wastes, non-commercially valuable by-products of the pulp and paper industry, etc. The process makes use of novel hybrid,multifunctional, and nano-sized solid catalysts recently developed in our Industrial Catalysis Laboratory. The use of these catalysts results in a significant decrease in the production cost by reducing the number of the process steps, increasing the yields of wanted products whereas decreasing those of the unwanted by-products, and allowing an instantaneous separation of the catalysts from the reaction effluent. Moreover, a new environmentally friendly procedure of products separation, not using any solvent, leads to additional process advantages. This biomass-based process, when fully developed, will be an extremely valid alternative to petroleum-based processes that currently produce transportation fuels and monomers for several important plastics and synthetic fibres. In addition to enormous advantages due to the use of such catalytic systems, it is worth mentioning that cellulosic biomass has a neutral balance in terms of greenhouse gas emission.