Project
The transition to low-carbon fuels is critical for a sustainable future. Current biomass-to-biofuel technologies mainly rely on high-pressure hydrogen — an expensive resource that is difficult to handle. The ERC-funded CLEVER-FUEL project develops a novel process to produce deoxygenated hydrocarbons using water as the hydrogen source, simplifying the process, reducing costs and boosting safety.
Our Objective
A safe, affordable hydrogen resource to produce biofuels
CLEVER-FUEL proposes a revolutionary approach for low-carbon fuels production, paving the way for a direct "waste to biofuels" conversion strategy. The project will develop a completely novel route to produce deoxygenated hydrocarbons — highly important chemical compounds in the biofuel and biochemical industries — via the design of advanced catalysts for the H₂-free hydrodeoxygenation (HDO) process.
This ground-breaking route takes the edge over current biomass upgrading approaches, which rely on high-pressure hydrogen — an expensive resource whose manipulation, transport and storage imposes serious limitations and represents a bottleneck to commercial deployment. CLEVER-FUEL circumvents this handicap by using the cheapest and safest possible hydrogen source: water.
The overriding goal is achieved through:
- H₂-Free HDO: a new conversion pathway using water as hydrogen donor and advanced multifunctional catalysts able to catalyse water reduction and hydrodeoxygenation simultaneously, yielding oxygen-free biofuels.
- Multifunctional Catalysts: resolving the upgrading of oxygen-rich bio-compounds in a single reactor under mild conditions, avoiding the external supply of high-pressure hydrogen.
- Process Intensification: combining unique catalysts with advanced operando characterisation techniques and novel reactor concepts based on microchannel catalytic systems.
CLEVER-FUEL represents a forward-thinking concept in catalysis and reaction engineering, conceived to open new horizons in bioenergy research and offering catalytic solutions to big societal challenges in the pursuit of a low-carbon future.