Pressure cook’ food waste to make fuel faster.

Pressure cook’ food waste to make fuel faster.A two-step method that includes hydrothermal liquefaction and anaerobic digestion can speed up the process of making biofuel from food waste while reducing carbon use, new research suggests. “Food waste should have a high value. We’re treating it as a resource, and we’re making marketable products out of it,” says lead author Roy Posmanik, a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell University. “Food waste is still carbon—a lot of carbon.” The researchers show that by using hydrothermal liquefaction before anaerobic digestion, virtually all of the energy is extracted from the food waste. In hydrothermal liquefaction, the waste is basically pressure cooked to produce a crude bio-oil. That oil can be refined into biofuel. more