James Clark, the director of the University of York’s Green Center of Excellence, will present some of the newest chemical technologies that could help producing clean biofuels and at the same time eliminate waste, at the Annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
“We have shown that wax products with numerous applications, can be extracted from crop and other by-products including wheat and barley straws, timber residues and grasses, using supercritical carbon dioxide – a green chemical technology that allows the production of products with no solvent residues,” he says.
“The extracted residues can be used in applications including construction as well as in bioprocessing.”
Clark will propose a solution using low-temperature microwave pyrolysis of biomass, just because it allows a preciser control over the heating process, and saves energy, too. An advantage of using this technology is also the quality of the obtained oils.
The professor is also suggesting his method could produce bio-chars, a “green” form of charcoal, that could be used as an additive or even a substitute for extracted coal in power plants.
[via eurekalert]
