5-37: Replacing crude oil by renewable biomass sugar through a novel synthetic enzymatic technology

To address a key question “what will replace oil and when” for the sustainability revolution, we will present a novel idea – sugar hydrogen fuel cell vehicle (sugar car) because of a new technology called cell-free synthetic enzymatic pathway biotransformation (SyPaB).  SyPaB is implementation of complicated biochemical reactions by in vitro assembly of numerous enzymes, called enzyme cocktail.  SyPaB technology has been used to produce hydrogen, polyols, electricity, and even fix CO₂.  SyPaB has clear advantages over microbial fermentation, such as high product yield, fast reaction rate, easy process control, and so on.  The sugar car concept is based on available hydrogen fuel cell vehicle, where a big hydrogen container will be replaced by a small sugar container and an on-board bioreformer containing the enzyme cocktail.  Our biomass-to-wheel efficiency analysis suggested that sugar car would have similar efficiency to battery electric vehicles and have near four times more efficient than cellulosic ethanol-internal combustion engine.  Several obstacles to commercialization of SyPaB and sugar car are being addressed by international collaborators.  In future, carbohydrate is much better than oil according to numerous criteria: low cost, renewability, carbon neutrality, evenly distributed resource, safety,and better performances in the transportation sector and renewable materials.  A small fraction of the USA biomass resource (e.g., 5%) would be sufficient to replace crude oil.