A New Source of Renewable Energy: Breaking Down Plant Matter



Electricity and water may be used to break the strong chemical bonds in biomass, or plant matter, according to a newly established chemical technique by the researchers.

These chemical instruments can access renewable energy derived from plants, potentially reducing our dependency on fossil fuels.

Given the rising costs of energy and the rapidly developing effects of burning fossil fuels on the world climate, scientists have never had a more urgent need to find routes to completely renewable goods and fuels.

According to Ned Jackson, an organic chemistry professor in the College of Natural Science at Michigan State University, "We use 20 million barrels of oil a day in the U.S.; that's roughly a fifth of the world's usage." "All of our liquid fuels and almost all of our manufactured goods, from garments and countertops to gasoline and gallon jugs, begin with petroleum, or crude oil."

For all of these areas of daily life, it is crucial to provide the tools for switching from fossil fuels to renewable sources of carbon. But even the most hopeful projections, Jackson noted, "only have approximately two-thirds as much carbon in it as the crude oil that the country uses in what we could collect annually from biomass in the U.S."

Jackson and Yuting Zhao, a former graduate student who is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Illinois, have identified a chemical method that breaks the robust chemical bonds in biomass, or plant matter. This method uses electricity and water. Lignin, a carbon-rich biomass component that is frequently lost or burned as a byproduct of paper production, could be treated using this "electrocatalytic" method. Environmental pollutants could potentially be eliminated with this novel technology.

In the journal Nature Communications, the study was just recently released.

Unlocking the carbon and energy trapped in biomass is a global goal in order to make biomass a viable alternative to petroleum. But in order to transform this intricate, difficult, low-energy material into the constituent parts of fuels and goods, new, effective techniques are required. Tools are required specifically to release the powerful chemical bonds holding it together while preserving and even improving as much of the carbon and energy content as is feasible.

One of the things that motivates us, according to Jackson, is the notion that the primary way we utilize petroleum is as fuel for energy production, which releases greenhouse gases into the environment. "The new study is a step toward replacing some of the current fossil fuels that we consume with beneficial carbon molecules."

According to Yuting Zhou, Grace E. Klinger, Eric L. Hegg, Christopher M. Saffron, and James E. Jackson, "Skeletal Ni electrode-catalyzed C-O cleavage of diaryl ethers entails direct elimination via benzyne intermediates" was published in Nature Communications on April 19, 2022.

By MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY AUGUST 6, 2022

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