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An Unusual Triangular Molecule Can Be Used To Make Jet Fuel – New Study Finds

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Aircraft transport people, ship commodities, and conduct military operations, but the petroleum-based fuels that power them are in short supply.

Researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have discovered a technique to make an alternative jet fuel by harvesting a unique carbon molecule produced by the metabolic process of bacteria usually found in soil, according to research published today in the journal Joule.

According to the main author Pablo Cruz-Morales (@pablocruzmoral1), a microbiologist at the Technical University of Denmark, “In chemistry, everything that requires energy to make will release energy when it’s broken.”

When petroleum jet fuel is burned, a massive quantity of energy is released, and scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory’s Keasling Lab reasoned that there must be a method to reproduce this without waiting millions of years for fresh fossil fuels to emerge.

Cruz-Morales was a postdoc at Jay Keasling’s group at the University of California, Berkeley when he approached Cruz-Morales to see if he could synthesise a challenging molecule that has the potential to generate a lot of energy.

Cruz-Morales says, “Keasling told me: it’s gonna be an explosive idea”.

The molecule that Keasling wanted to copy was called Jawsamycin. It got its name from the movie “Jaws” because it looked like it had bite marks. This molecule is made by the common bacteria streptomyces, which Cruz-Morales had worked with before.

An Unusual Triangular Molecule That Can Be Used To Make Jet Fuel - New Study Finds
An Unusual Triangular Molecule That Can Be Used To Make Jet Fuel – New Study Finds

Cruz-Morales asserts that “the recipe already exists in nature”. 

As the bacteria consume glucose, their biological metabolism creates the angular molecule. He claims that when animals consume sugar or amino acids, they break them down and transform them into the components of carbon-to-carbon bonds.

The chemical and mechanism by which you produce fat in your body are the same, but this bacterial process has some extremely intriguing twists.

These twists—which are made up of cyclopropane rings, which are rings made up of three carbon atoms stacked in a triangle shape—are what give the molecules their explosive capabilities.

“If you have bonds that are at a normal angle, an open chain of carbons, the carbons can be flexible and they get comfortable,” according to Cruz-Morales.

“Let’s say you make them into a ring of six carbons –they can still move and dance a little bit. But the triangle shape makes the bonds bend, and that tension requires energy to make.”

After a thorough examination, the scientists discovered that polyketide synthases were the enzymes that produced these highly energetic cyclopropane molecules.

Cruz-Morales claims that “Polyketide synthases are the ultimate biological tool to make organic chemistry.”

According to Cruz-Morales, the fuel made by the bacteria would function similarly to biodiesel. It would need to be modified in order to ignite at a temperature lower than that required to burn a fatty acid, but once it did, it would have enough explosive force to launch a rocket into space.

“If we can make this fuel with biology there’s no excuses to make it with oil,” adds Cruz-Morales. “It opens the possibility of making it sustainable.”

Cruz-Morales hopes that he and the other researchers from the Department of Energy who worked on the project will be able to make this process bigger in the future so that their alternative fuel can be used in planes.

“The problem right now is that fossil fuels are subsidized,” Cruz-Morales adds.

“This is something that is not only related to the technology, but the geopolitical and socio-political constitution of the planet right now. You can see this as a preparation for the moment because we are going to run out of fossil fuels, and there’s going to be a point, not far from now, when we will need alternative solutions.”

Image Credit: Getty

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