George Huber of UMass Amherst has received a $400,000 CAREER grant from the National Science Foundation to pursue his revolutionary method for making biofuels, or "green gasoline," from wood or grasses, a process that would be much less expensive than conventional gasoline or ethanol made from corn. "We've proven this method on a small scale in the lab," says Huber, a professor of chemical engineering. "But we need to make further improvements and prove it on a large scale before it's going to be economically viable."
Huber's method is for making biofuels from cellulose, the non-edible portion of plant biomass and a major component of grasses and wood. At $10 to $30 per barrel of oil energy equivalent, cellulosic biomass is significantly cheaper than crude oil. The U.S. could potentially produce 1.3 billion dry tons of cellulosic biomass per year, which has the energy content of four billion barrels of crude oil. That's more than half of the seven billion barrels of crude oil consumed in our country each year. What's more, biomass as an energy crop could increase the national farm income by $3 to $6 billion per year.
To learn more about Huber's work, visit http://www.umass.edu/newsoffice/newsreleases/articles/73832.php.