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Phoenix666 writes:

A team at the Catalysis Institute at Cardiff University is hoping to make biofuel production more efficient and sustainable by recycling the leftovers from the process.

Currently, biofuel production uses methanol, which is combined with fats and oils. The process generates glycerol as a waste product, but the material is too full of impurities for cost effective reuse. This is where researchers spotted an opportunity to increase the yield, using a simple catalysis to recycle glycerol into methanol that can be used to produce more biodiesel.

They added water to glycerol as a source of hydrogen and used MgO (magnesium oxide) and CeO2 (cerium oxide) as catalysts. They experimented with different temperatures, catalysis periods and chemical combinations to test their idea. They say the results they achieved point the way to a new catalytic route from aqueous glycerol to methanol, with the potential to increase yield by an estimated 10 percent.

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