Fruit offers fuel of future for vehicles

London: A way of turning plant sugar into a fuel as powerful as petrol has been discovered by scientists.

Researchers in the United States have developed a way of converting fructose, the sugar that gives apples and oranges their sweet taste, into a fuel that can be burned to generate energy.

For years, chemists have been searching for a way to sidestep the use of crude oil as the root source of chemicals for fuels, aiming to replace it with inexpensive, non-polluting plant matter.

Now a team of American researchers has discovered a process for turning fructose into 2,5-dimethylfuran (DMF), a liquid fuel which packs in as much energy as petrol - and 40 per cent more than ethanol. "Currently, ethanol is the only renewable liquid fuel produced on a large scale," says Prof James Dumesic, who led the research team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "But ethanol suffers from several limitations. It has relatively low energy density, evaporates readily, and can become contaminated by absorption of water from the atmosphere."

Prof Dumesic predicted that although challenges remained for commercial applications, the process could help reduce dependence on petroleum in the near future. Details of the process were outlined yesterday in the journal Nature. In the UK, there are up to three million tons of surplus grain each year, enough to produce sufficient ethanol to meet a 2010 fuel target.