WPI researchers create food-to-biofuel method
Courtesy/Worcester Polytechnic Institute
Researchers at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, led by chemical engineering professor Michael Timko, have created a new way to convert food waste into renewable fuel.
Researchers at Worcester Polytechnic Institute have created a new way to convert food waste into renewable fuel.
Scientists, led by chemical engineering professor Michael Timko, employed a process called hydrothermal liquefaction to break down food waste into liquid, which removes the need to cultivate expensive and time-consuming algae.
The idea, Timko said, is that creating biodiesel through this method can bring down the price of gas and offset up to 15.3 million tons of carbon dioxide every year.
Timko’s team is in the process of figuring out how to make the conversion process easier to scale and bring to the commercial market, according to a press release from the college. Others who played key roles in the research are assistant professor Andrew Teixeira and doctorate student Heather LeClerc, a Fulbright scholar.
“By creating a biodiesel through this method, we’ve shown that we can bring the price of gas down to $1.10 per gallon, and potentially even lower,” he said.
The research is part of a multi-year project funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation and the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center. It has been detailed in a new paper in the journal iScience.
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