Development of Liquid Biofuels and Chiral Molecules from Biomass

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Since the beginning of the 21st century, human civilization has been facing two major problems: the depletion of fossil fuels, and environmental problems caused by the extensive use of fossil fuels for the production of energy and a variety of chemicals. An effective way to address these concerns, without sacrificing our living standards, is to use biomass instead of fossil fuels as an alternative source of raw material for producing energy and chemicals. The use of low value biomass such as agricultural and forestry residues, animal manure, algae and agri-food processing waste is highly desirable as it does not compete with the production of agricultural and forestry products. The long term goal of this proposed program is to develop technically feasible, economically viable and environmentally friendly processes for producing high quality liquid biofuels and value-added chiral compounds from biomass wastes. One of the two proposed research themes is focused on the production of high quality transportation fuels meeting the requirements of existing infrastructure (e.g. vehicle engines, pipelines and filling stations). Hydrothermal liquefaction technology will be employed to co-liquefy a variety of biomass wastes in order to increase crude bio-oil yield and optimize the product distribution. Subsequently, novel catalysts will be developed and applied to upgrade crude bio-oil into biofuels which are comparable to the fuels derived from petroleum. Anticipated outcomes will reduce dependence on fossil fuels, improve sustainability, and add extra revenue streams to agricultural, forestry and aquaculture sectors. The other research theme is the development of efficient processes for the production of pure chiral molecules. Chiral molecules are ones that can rearrange their structure to give rise to mirror image forms. These mirror image forms, called enantiomers, are not identical. The chiral nature of molecules has a major concern in the pharmaceutical industry, since the different enantiomers of a chiral drug molecule may cause very distinct reactions, when interacted with proteins, sugars and DNA in living organisms. A dramatic example is the thalidomide tragedy happened in the early 1960s, when thalidomide was sold as a mixture of two enantiomers. One enantiomer of thalidomide alleviated morning sickness while the other enantiomer caused birth defects. There has been a rapidly growing demand of pure enantiomer compounds for a safer drug formulation.The proposed research will target at two technologies for the preparation of single enantiomers: one, a twist on a conventional method (crystallization resolution) , and the second, an emerging research area, based on the extraction of small chiral molecule building blocks from crude bio-oil derived from liquefaction of biomass. Anticipated outcomes will provide pharmaceutical industries more efficient and cost-effective processes to obtain single enantiomer compounds, reducing the costs of the early stage of chiral drug development.