A research team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has won a $50,000 ConocoPhillips Energy Prize to support the development of a carbohydrate-to-biodiesel process. The technology, which is designed to significantly increase yields, may also provide a pathway for the direct conversion of hydrogen and carbon dioxide into biofuels.

According to Gregory Stephanopoulos, an MIT processor of chemical engineering who is leading the project, the technology utilizes an engineered microbe to convert carbohydrate feedstocks into lipids. While Stephanopoulos noted that he is unable to disclose specific details of the process due to its proprietary nature, he said that the patent-pending technology can be applied to a wide portfolio of carbohydrate feedstocks, including sugars, glucose, glycerin, hydrolysates from biomass and algae.

"The yields that we obtain from this microbe are very remarkable," Stephanopoulos said. "They are very close to the theoretical maximum. For a project like biodiesel, you need to have very high yields, otherwise the cost of the feedstock becomes prohibitively high." The microbe that the process utilizes is a heterotrophic microbe, Stephanopoulos continued, meaning that it grows on carbohydrates-not light and water. "In other words, it is not an algae type of application," he said. "That’s why the yields are important, because the feedstock-the raw material that you put in the [process] costs money. It’s not free carbon dioxide."

Once the carbohydrates are converted into lipids by the microbe, the process to convert those lipids into biodiesel is rather straightforward, Stephanopoulos said. This can be done using the standard transesterification process.

The funding provided by ConocoPhillips will expand upon the initial research to explore the use of hydrogen and CO2 as process inputs. "The ConocoPhillips project uses this technology as the core, but at the same time is expanding this technology for the fixation of CO2 using hydrogen, and we aim the fixation of CO2 towards the production of other types of organic molecules that we then feed as a feedstock to the oil-producing microbe," Stephanopoulos said.

The goals of the ConocoPhillips project are broad, Stephanopoulos continued. "Principle among them is the production of some significant amounts of oil in order to test its properties and establish that it is indeed suitable for operations in different kinds of engines, and process it for the production of jet fuel and the like," he said.

According to Stephanopoulos, it will be unnecessary to construct a new facility to evaluate the process on a pilot scale. Rather, existing facilities will likely be used to test the scalability of the technology. Stephanopoulos estimates that initial scale-up evaluations could begin within six months. Hussain Abidi, an MIT postdoctoral associate, has been working with Stephanopoulos on the project.