Investigating a New, More Efficient Path From Corn-to-Energy

Modern corn ethanol is a marvel of clean fuel production, harnessing the energy of the sun to make a single seed into 600 or more kernels, and then rendering the glucose polymers in the grain into an alcohol fuel. Modern production efficiency renders nearly three gallons of fuel from every bushel.

Making alcohol is a biological catalytic process as old as civilization, but, even with the latest refinements, the biology in the process requires the sacrifice of about a third of the glucose molecules in the lifecycle of the yeast catalyst, producing CO2 along with the alcohol.

Paul Dauenhauer, a University of Minnesota Professor of Chemical Engineering, asks, what if there were a process that could utilize 100 percent of the corn glucose polymers to make fuel? He believes an inorganic catalyst could turn all those molecules into another form of alcohol, called methanol.

In a project funded by the Minnesota corn checkoff, Dauenhauer is testing a series of metal catalysts, to see which could produce the highest yield at the greatest economic efficiency.