From chip shop to pit stop

Scientists make cooking oil biofuel as efficient as diesel

11-Dec-2024 - A new way to produce fuels made from leftover fat can create biofuel as effective as diesel and 1000-times more efficiently than current methods a new study has suggested. Published in Green Chemistry, researchers from King’s College London and the Brazilian Biorenewables National Laboratory used ...

Start-up Entrepreneurs Want to Make Chemical Industry More Sustainable

06-Nov-2024 - To date, the chemical industry has been dependent on fossil resources, but these are finite, and their use is detrimental to the climate. That is why researchers from the Department of Biochemical and Chemical Engineering at TU Dortmund University are developing processes for treating renewable ...

Old becomes new - how new chemical products are made from used frying oil

Selective one-pot reaction

18-Oct-2024 - Every year, 119 million tons of used vegetable oil are produced worldwide, mainly from commercial kitchens and restaurants. Only a small proportion of this is reused, for example in the production of fuels such as biodiesel. At the Leibniz Institute for Catalysis in Rostock (LIKAT), PhD student ...

Advancements in Carbon Capture and Utilisation (CCU) Technology Pave the Way for Novel Applications From Ethylene, to Polymers, Syngas and Even Diamonds

Tough competition of outstanding innovations unveiled at the CO2-based Fuels and Chemicals Conference 2024

09-Apr-2024 - This year's nominees for the innovation award “Best CO2-Utilisation 2024” prove that CO2 innovations can be used to produce syngas, polymers, organic fatty acids, ethylene, renewable isopropyl alcohol (IPA), but also aviation fuels and diamonds. The award is one of the highlights of the CO2-based ...

Genetically harmful compounds detected in vegetable oils

Genotoxins discovered for the first time using a novel method

06-Mar-2023 - Vegetable oils rich in unsaturated fatty acids are highly recommended for a healthy diet. But these oils are not as healthy as thought: Prof. Dr. Gertrud Morlock, holder of the Chair of Life Sciences at Justus Liebig University Giessen (JLU), together with PhD student Daniel Meyer, has for the ...

Hybrid electro-biosystem upcycles carbon dioxide into energy-rich long-chain compounds

Upcycling CO₂ via electrochemical and metabolic engineering

03-May-2022 - Artificial upcycling of carbon dioxide (CO2) into value-added products in a sustainable manner represents an opportunity to tackle environmental issues and realize a circular economy. However, compared with facilely available C1/C2 products, efficient and sustainable synthesis of energy-rich ...

How sugar-loving microbes could help power future cars

Genetically engineered E. coli eat glucose, then help turn it into molecules found in gasoline

24-Nov-2021 - It sounds like modern-day alchemy: Transforming sugar into hydrocarbons found in gasoline. But that’s exactly what scientists have done. In a study in Nature Chemistry, researchers report harnessing the wonders of biology and chemistry to turn glucose (a type of sugar) into olefins (a type of ...

Surrey builds AI to find anti-ageing chemical compounds

27-Jul-2021 - The University of Surrey has built an artificial intelligence (AI) model that identifies chemical compounds that promote healthy ageing - paving the way towards pharmaceutical innovations that extend a person's lifespan. In a paper published by Nature Communication's Scientific Reports, a team of ...

As hard as a diamond and as deformable as metal

Scientists develop new material for tomorrow's technology

15-Jan-2021 - Smartphones with large glass housings and displays are impressive, but they are also very prone to get cracked and scratched. To prevent these kinds of damages, a material combining the hardness of diamond and the deformability of metals would be ideal – and is indeed considered the holy grail of ...

A new tool to create chemical complexity from fatty acids

A new catalyst design enables unprecedented control over the modification of fatty acid derivatives that opens the door to creating useful substances in a green and efficient manner

25-Aug-2020 - Hokkaido University WPI-ICReDD researchers developed a modular catalyst that can accurately modify fatty acid derivatives in a hitherto inaccessible position. This enables the efficient production of valuable compounds from a renewable bioresource, whereas before we had to either rely on ...