Sustainable Fuel For The Transportation Sector

An anonymous reader writes: A chemical engineering research team from Purdue University has proposed an interesting new way to obtain sustainable liquid hydrocarbon fuels, similar to diesel, for transportation. The proposed method is to combine carbon atoms (from biomass or coal) with hydrogen (obtained from electrolysis of water, electricity being generated by carbon-free source such as wind, solar or nuclear) in a modified Fischer-Tropsch reaction to produce medium chain alkanes similar to diesel. If this works, it will be a viable method to make fuels that our internal combustion engines can run on with no modification, without being based on imported oil supplies, having the potential to be fully renewable (when based on biomass and wind/solar), without the need to build a hydrogen supply chain, without the need to develop car-scale fuel cells, without the need for large batteries, while using a fraction of the land area that biodiesel or ethanol would use, all while using existing transportation infrastructure. Best of all, the carbon released in the final customer's car or truck would be captured by the biomass again, closing the carbon loop.