Aviation offers a way forward in biofuels research

Biofuels researchers are increasingly thinking about how the energy market is changing, which challenges them to balance the basic science of new fuels with a more holistic view of the most commercially viable ways to produce them. So when a group of University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers began looking at how to make jet fuel from biomass, they also strived to create a "techno-economic" framework that would illuminate the entire biofuels field. Aniruddha Upadhye (left) and George Huber in front of a reactor used in the process of creating biofuels. Photo: Scott Gordon In a paper published in Energy & Environmental Science , George Huber , a professor of chemical and biological engineering at UW-Madison, and his collaborators mapped out an integrated approach for processing red maple biomass into a jet fuel that costs $4.75 a gallon. Supported by funding from the DARPA Office of Science, Huber's study improves on previous research by factoring in the impurities of real biomass, an inefficiency that's not accounted for in studies that use model compounds as a starting point. "Most biofuels research has focused on small aspects of an entire bio-refinery," says Aniruddha Upadhye , a Ph.D. student in Huber's group and one of the paper's co-authors.