ABSTRACT
Biomass suffers from being a solid fuel, hard to collect, hard to store, and hard to feed into combustion equipment. The simplest liquid fuels made from biomass are methanol (wood alcohol) from synthesis gas and ethanol (grain alcohol) made by fermentation of sugars from starch or cellulose. However, these chemical compounds have exact boiling points, so that thermogravimetric analysis is not applicable. However, there is wide interest in a number of other liquid fuels from biomass. A recent survey (Stevens, 1994) summarizes ten years of work of the Department of Energy Laboratories on conversion of biomass, primarily to liquid and gas fuels.
