From sugars to affordable hydrocarbon fuels: The Digest’s 2017 Multi-Slide Guide to Catalytic Upgrading R&D

The US Department of Energy has set a goal to “Select and develop at least one route for catalytic upgrading of sugars/related intermediates and/or biologically derived intermediates into fuel blendstockswith conversion performance than can achieve a MFSP of $3/GGE by 2022 with >25% (GGE basis) of the fuel in the jet or diesel ranges”.

In this slide deck., project leaders Rick Elander, David Johnson, and Derek Vardon of NREL; Chaitanya Narula and Zhenglong Li of ORNL; Andrew Sutton of LANL; and Mike Lilga and Asanga Padmaperuma at PNNL outlined efforts to “develop and evaluate several routes for catalytic upgrading of sugars/related intermediates into hydrocarbon fuels and co-products, including:Ethanol → HC fuels, Other fermentation intermediates → HC fuels, and Sugars/sugar-derived intermediates → HC fuels”. The slides were originally presented at the DOE Project Peer Review.