Liquid Fuels From Alternative Carbon Sources Minimizing Carbon Dioxide Emissions

The energy needs of the world continue to grow, as does the resulting environmental impact.  Policy makers continue to call for alternative energies to replace today’s petroleum based liquid fuels.  However, liquid fuels have significant advantages and it is probably unwise to abandon the existing infrastructure without appropriately exploring alternatives to lessen the environmental burden of producing liquid fuels.  Biomass and coal are often proposed as alternatives to petroleum based carbon sources, but we demonstrate that those processes, by themselves, lose a significant amount of their potential product to unwanted carbon dioxide emissions.  However, combining biomass and coal with cleaner natural gas yield processes with less environmental impact to produce liquid fuels with small, zero, or even negative, carbon dioxide emissions.  Our process synthesis approach is applied to commonly encountered liquid fuel production methods in order to identify promising routes and to establish feasibility limits on those less promising alternatives.