A new study from researchers, including those in Worcester Polytechnic Institute’s Department of Chemical Engineering, has found the fastest-growing plant on Earth may offer a sustainable and cost-effective alternative to petroleum-derived transportation fuels.
The researchers, including Michael Timko, the William B. Smith Professor of chemical engineering and head of the department, and Timothy Woodard, MS’23, PhD ’26, have demonstrated that bamboo could serve as a highly promising raw material for the production of sustainable liquid fuels to power vehicles, planes, and trains. The team’s study, published in the journal Sustainable Energy & Fuels, finds that bamboo can be turned into fuel at a production cost that is competitive to conventional petroleum fuels and with substantially lower greenhouse gas emissions. The study combined laboratory experiments measuring bamboo-to-biocrude conversion efficiency with economic and life-cycle assessment modeling.
Michael Timko
“Our study suggests bamboo has a role to play in the future of fuel,” says Timko. “I think this research is especially timely and important because fuel prices are high and the transportation sector produces more greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. than any other. Bamboo would use different land than we are using for food production, so there is no food versus fuel trade-off. Farmers win, consumers win.”
Key factors in the study are the hydrothermal liquefaction (HTL) technology that converts biomass to fuel and the choice of feedstock. Using bamboo for fuel can reduce greenhouse gasses in two ways: The process to convert it into biocrude is more efficient than when using other feedstocks, and bamboo itself captures and stores large amounts of carbon both above and below ground. Because of the plant’s fast growth even in poor soil conditions, the study finds that converting bamboo into fuel through HTL could match the level of corn-ethanol production in the U.S. while also using roughly 13% as much cultivated land. Unlike annual crops used for many biofuels, bamboo is a perennial grass that can produce large amounts of biomass with relatively low agricultural inputs. And, compared with other perennial grasses, bamboo has very low ash content (less than 1% by dry weight), meaning that the conversion process generates negligible waste.
Economic modeling indicates that bamboo-based fuel could sell for as little as $2.75 per gasoline-gallon equivalent under mature commercial-scale conditions, accounting for the money required to build and operate the fuel plant, suggesting strong economic competitiveness as the renewable-fuel industry expands.
The team’s analysis also finds that using bamboo as a fuel source creates a level of greenhouse gas emissions 26 times lower than those of conventional petroleum diesel fuel: A life-cycle assessment, considering the ability of bamboo to store large amounts of carbon in its underground rhizomes , finds producing fuel from bamboo and its use would generate a greenhouse gas intensity of 3.5 grams of carbon dioxide-equivalent per megajoule of energy.
