SoylentNews

takyon writes:

Chemists have made an expensive precursor chemical (levoglucosan) from three kinds of biomass:

Chemical engineers and chemists from Rice University and China's Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics have made something so useful and unusual they aren't yet sure how much it's worth. In a new paper [DOI: 10.1039/C6GC01600F] in the journal Green Chemistry, a team led by Rice's Michael Wong describes a new process for making extremely pure levoglucosan (LGA), a naturally occurring organic compound that has been so rare and expensive that drugmakers and chemical engineers typically haven't considered using it.

"A couple of years ago, we got to thinking about chemistries that could turn biomass into something of greater value than heat or biofuels," said Wong, professor and chair of Rice's Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and professor of chemistry. "Most chemicals are made from oil and gas, but you can't make LGA from petrochemicals. LGA has a very interesting structure that makes it a much better starter molecule than sugar, but it's been hard for researchers to work with LGA when quantities are limited. LGA is so difficult and inefficient to make that whatever small amounts were commercially available were very expensive."

Wong said LGA's value derives from the options it presents to drugmakers and chemical engineers who specialize in chemical synthesis, a branch of chemistry that lies at the center of some of the world's largest industries, including pharmaceuticals, petrochemicals, plastics and polymers. The complex chemicals these industries produce are built up from smaller chemicals, much like a Lego model is built from individual bricks. LGA is an organic precursor chemical, one of the organic "bricks" that a chemist could use in a synthesis reaction.

Original Submission