Johnson Matthey and NREL team up on $7m biofuel project

Chemicals giant Johnson Matthey and the US Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have teamed up for a biofuels project.

The initiative will last five years, and is aiming to produce ‘drop-in’ petrol, diesel and jet fuels, that would not need any engine modifications to work.

It is believed that the $7 million project will look at a number of possible materials to create the biofuel including non-food biomass feedstocks such as poplar or pine trees, agricultural waste, municipal solid waste, switch grass and forestry.

Johnson Matthey will work with NREL on improving the pyrolysis section of the process. During this phase, biomass is heated to incredibly high temperatures under pressure. This is intended to speed up production and lower costs.

Transportation fuels are produced during this process when the biomass decomposes and vapour is produced – it is this vapour that is off use in such fuels.

The partnership between the two companies makes sense as NREL is known around the world for its biomass conversion expertise. Meanwhile, Johnson Matthey is a leading supplier of catalysts and process technologies, working within a number of sectors including biofuels.

Andrew Heavers, business development director at Johnson Matthey, commented: “Combining Johnson Matthey’s understanding of catalysis with NREL’s biomass processing capabilities will help accelerate the development of more economic routes to biofuels,”

Mark Nimlos, research supervisor for molecular sciences at NREL, said that the aim of the project is to discover catalytic systems that are able to generate biofuels at scale in a cost effective manner.

He continued: “The best outcome would be, in five years, to have a new catalytic process which can make gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel at a price range that is better than, or competitive with, the cost of existing fuels.”