Our recent research on synthesis of renewable biodiesel has made new progress, and the work “Synthesis of renewable diesel with hydroxyacetone and 2-methyl-furan” has been published on the Chemical Communications (2013, 49, 5727-5729), which was selected as Cover Story in Chem. Commun..

Efficient transformation of biomass to renewable fuels and chemicals is a fundamental solution to the energy crisis and environment problems caused by excessive utilization of fossil fuel. Diesel and jet fuel, are two kinds of most demanding fuels, which are mainly from petroleum. It’s of vital importance for use of lignocellulose (main component of agriculture wastes and forest residues) derived platform chemicals in the synthesis of diesel and jet fuel range alkanes. Glycerol is the by-product of biodiesel, and the status of its oversupply made utilization of glycerol and its derivatives as the feedstock for fuels and high value-added chemicals of great significance. Hydroxyacetone is the dehydration product of glycerol. It has a similar structure as acetone and is a potential platform compound for the synthesis of renewable diesel or jet fuel via the C-C coupling along with hydrodeoxygenation (HDO) route. 2-methylfuran is also an important biomass platform chemical in the biodiesel production. It can be obtained from vapor phase hydrogenation of furfural at 523K and the yield could be as high as 87.0%. In this work, the HAA of 2-MF and hydroxyacetone over a series of solid acid catalysts is reported for the first time. Under solvent-free conditions, 79.1% yield of HAA products was obtained over Nafion-212 resin. After the HDO of the HAA products over the Pd/C catalyst, 79.5% carbon yield for diesel or jet fuel range alkanes could be achieved. Compared with the 2-MF–acetone route described in our previous work, the hydroxyacetone route has many advantages such as higher HAA reactivity and carbon yield of diesel or jet fuel range alkanes in the HDO process. This work brought a brand new route for synthesis of renewable biodiesel.