Ready-to-use recipe for turning plant waste into gasoline

Bioscience engineers at KU Leuven already knew how to make gasoline in the laboratory from plant waste such as sawdust. Now the researchers have developed a roadmap, as it were, for industrial cellulose gasoline. In 2014, at KU Leuven's Centre for Surface Chemistry and Catalysis, researchers succeeded in converting sawdust into building blocks for gasoline. A chemical process made it possible to convert the cellulose - the main component of plant fibres - in the sawdust into hydrocarbon chains. These hydrocarbons can be used as an additive in gasoline. The resulting cellulose gasoline is a second generation biofuel, explains Professor Bert Sels. "We start with plant waste and use a chemical process to make a product that is a perfect replica of its petrochemical counterpart.