The U.S. Department of Defense began searching for a

biorenewable source of jet-fuel in 2007.

Shortly after, N.C. State professors Henry Lamb, William Roberts and Larry

Stikeleather met and submitted a proposal to the Defense Advanced Research

Projects Agency.

While companies such as General Electric and UOP received grants, research began on a

one-year project funded by the Biofuel Center of North Carolina, according

to Tim Turner, a doctoral student in mechanical engineering who came up

with the overall process steps for Centia.

The results were revolutionary.

“Centia is a process that can convert any fat or oil into a reuseable fuel. It can convert soy bean oil into gasoline or jet fuel,” Lamb

said.

Centia has three complex steps.

“You take lard, animal fat of any kind, soy bean oil, grease, any fat and

you can convert it into fatty acids,” Lamb said.

Lamb said the next step in the process is to remove oxygen from the fatty

acids by deoxygenation.  

“What is left is a hydrocarbon,” Lamb said.

The hydrocarbon can then be refined to make jet fuel, he said.

“If you want to use it as jet fuel, then you can perform some catalytic

chemistry similar to what you find in a petroleum refinery,” Lamb said.

He said the hydrocarbons can also be used to make diesel fuel and gasoline.

The quality diesel Centia produces is better than biodiesel, he added.

“It has a higher energy content because you don’t have the oxygen in it,”

Lamb said.

Lamb also said the process is reasonably cost effective, but it depends on

the cost of the raw material.

He said gasoline produced by the process would compete with naturally

found gasoline if the price of oil goes back up.

“The selling point is estimated to be between two and three dollars a

gallon,” he said.

Turner estimates that depending on funding, the process could be

commercially ready in three to five years.

There is still much work to be done, he warned.

“The problems are in scaling up, from making thimblefuls to liters,”

Turner said.

He said he would like to make five gallons of fuel to begin testing

in engines.

Lamb said the military cannot use typical biofuels because they can’t

meet the required specifications.

“If you can make a fuel that looks like the current fuels, then you don’t

have to modify the engines to accommodate the fuel,” he said.

According to Lamb, Roberts said Centia “has the potential to be a

drop in replacement for current fuels.”

Lamb said Centia will not be the answer to biofuels, but it will be

part of the solution.

“One problem with using soy bean oil is that it is also a source of food,” Lamb said.

“People were worried that we were going to take too many resources from

agriculture to make fuel.”

To assuage that fear, Lamb said he is looking into using oil from algae

and Jatropha, rather than food sources like soy beans.

Lamb said Jatropha grows in arid areas and isn’t edible, so it won’t

compete with food crops.

“This would be good because it isn’t a food product, and may be relatively

cheap,” he said.

Lamb said the main hurdle for the research to cross now is the lifetime of the catalyst.

“Right now, we can only make about one gallon for every gram of catalyst,

we need to be able to make hundreds or thousands of gallons from a single

gram for the process to be economical,” he said.