Old trees could become renewable fuels this Christmas

The paper found that pine needles could be used to make renewable fuels and value-added chemicals using only water as a solvent.

Between 6 and 8 million Christmas trees are sold in the UK each year, with an estimated 7 million going to landfill at the end of the festive season.

Each tree will produce methane gas, which is 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide, when it breaks down, and this is expensive.

Chemicals from pine needles can be used to make useful products. The chemical structure of pine needles could be broken down into a liquid product and a solid by-product with the help of heat and solvent.

This new paper is based on a previous University project. The research was carried out by Mara Andérez-Fernndez, a PhD student in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at the University ofSheffield.

When reacting carbon dioxide to capture CO 2 we use a metal to promote the reaction. We went back to some of the work we've done before with pine needles because we realized that we could potentially use them to turn carbon dioxide into formic acid.

The work shows how carbon dioxide and water can make useful products.

The carbon dioxide could be reacted with pine needles and water at high temperatures and a fraction of the pine needles would turn into the same product.

Baking soda or bicyle of soda is also known as carbon dioxide. This co-conversion with captured carbon dioxide, that we didn't have before in the previous pine needles research, has found that the two things enhance the conversion of each other, making it more efficient and making more of the end product.

Formic acid can be used in fuel cells to store and transport hydrogen, which can then be used as a power source, as it doesn't have any harmful emissions.

It is also used in the manufacture of leather and rubber.

The results of the study show a new strategy for the production of renewable fuels and value-added chemicals using only water as a solvent.

Although sugar cane works more effectively than pine needles, it's not possible to use sugar cane in January since there are more pine needles available.

The challenge in the process design could be caused by the fact that the refinery uses the same feedstock all year long. This would have to be built in if what you are feeding in changes. It's a place we would like to get to so that in January, we use millions of pine needles instead of going to landfill.

The chemicals could be used to replace less sustainable chemicals if pine needles were collected after Christmas.

This could lead to a decrease in the UK's carbon footprint by reducing the use of artificial plastic-based Christmas trees, reducing the amount of waste going to landfill and potentially saving 100,000 metric tons of greenhouse gases.

The Synergistic Hydrothermal Conversion of Aqueous Solutions of CO2 and Biomass Waste Liquefaction into Formate was written by Mara Andérez-Fernndez. The book is titled "acssuschemeng.2c06218."