By NoCamels Team Nearly a century ago Jewish chemist Chaim Weizmann invented a method of producing acetone for explosives – helping the British army with its WWI efforts. The British went on to win the great war alongside their allies and Weizmann moved to Israel to become the first president of the independent Jewish state.
Now, scientists at the University of California, Berkeley have found a way to utilize the same formula in order to generate a “greener” version of diesel fuel made from plants. While still more expensive to produce than fossil-based fuels, researchers say the new substance is more eco-friendly than regular diesel and that, unlike fossil-fuel, it is renewable.
“What I am really excited about is that this is a fundamentally different way of taking feedstocks – sugar or starch – and making all sorts of renewable things, from fuels to commodity chemicals like plastics,” said Dean Toste, professor of chemistry and co-author of a report on the new development that will appear in the Nov. 8 issue of the journal Nature.
Turning grass into fuel
During WWI, Weizmann found that using certain bacteria called Clostridium, he could turn sugar or starch into three chemicals: acetone, butanol and ethanol. While back then acetone was what the British were after, today, it’s the ethanol that is used to produce the oil-substitute, but the process remains the same.
A major advantage of this process is that it gives chemists great control over the fuel synthesized. Basically, the substance could be engineered to have the same qualities of diesel fuel, gasoline and even jet fuel.
The retooled process produces a mix of products that contain more energy per gallon than ethanol that is used today in transportation fuels and could be commercialized within 5-10 years. Although the scientists at UC Berkeley used corn and cane sugar for their experiment, in the future, many other organic substances could be used – even trees and grass.
Photo by Robert Sanders, UC Berkeley
More on Weizman from Wikipedia:
Weizmann lectured in chemistry at the University of Geneva between 1901 and 1903, and later taught at the University of Manchester. He became a British subject in 1910, and while a lecturer at Manchester he became famous for discovering how to use bacterial fermentation to produce large quantities of desired substances. He is considered to be the father of industrial fermentation. He used the bacterium Clostridium acetobutylicum (the Weizmann organism) to produce acetone. Acetone was used in the manufacture of cordite explosive propellants critical to the Allied war effort (see Royal Navy Cordite Factory, Holton Heath). Weizmann transferred the rights to the manufacture of acetone to the Commercial Solvents Corporation in exchange for royalties.[13]
First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill became aware of the possible use of Weizmann’s discovery in early 1915, and Minister of Munitions David Lloyd George joined Churchill in encouraging Weizmann’s development of the process. Pilot plant development of laboratory procedures was completed in 1915 at the J&W Nicholson & Co gin factory in Bow, London, so industrial scale production of acetone could begin in six British distilleries requisitioned for the purpose in early 1916. The effort produced 30,000 tonnes of acetone during the war, although a national collection of horse-chestnuts was required when supplies of maize were inadequate for the quantity of starch needed for fermentation. The importance of Weizmann’s work to the ongoing war effort encouraged Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to issue the Balfour Declaration of 1917 in support of Weizmann’s Zionist objectives as Weizmann ascended to the presidency of the British Zionist Federation.[1]
After the Shell Crisis of 1915 during World War I, Weizmann was director of the British Admiralty laboratories from 1916 until 1919. During World War II, he was an honorary adviser to the British Ministry of Supply and did research on synthetic rubber and high-octane gasoline. (Formerly Allied-controlled sources of rubber were largely inaccessible owing to Japanese occupation during World War II, giving rise to heightened interest in such innovations).
Concurrently, Weizmann devoted himself to the establishment of a scientific institute for basic research in the vicinity of his sprawling estate, in the town of Rehovot. Weizmann saw great promise in science as a means to bring peace and prosperity to the area. As stated in his own words :
“I trust and feel sure in my heart that science will bring to this land both peace and a renewal of its youth, creating here the springs of a new spiritual and material life. […] I speak of both science for its own sake and science as a means to an end.”[14]
His efforts led in 1934 to the creation of the Daniel Sieff Research Institute, which was financially supported by an endowment by Israel Sieff in memory of his late son. Weizmann actively conducted research in the laboratories of this institute, primarily in the field of organic chemistry. In 1949 the Sieff Institute was renamed the Weizmann Institute of Science in his honor. Weizmann’s success as a scientist and the success of the Institute he founded make him an iconic figure in the heritage of the Israeli scientific community today.
