Carbon fiber is glamorous. It helps shed precious pounds from performance-focused cars like those from McLaren (its carbon Monocell is pictured above) as well as upmarket eco-warriors like the BMW i3, and it is increasingly applied as merit-badge splashes of decor on sporty trims of myriad other vehicles. But it also has a dark side in that it’s by no means an eco-conscious material to produce.
Carbon fiber’s large ecological footprint centers around the way in which acrylonitrile, the base material for commercial carbon fiber, is currently made: from petroleum, using a process that uses quite a bit of energy, requires an expensive catalyst, and yields hydrogen cyanide, a toxic byproduct. This also helps explain carbon fiber’s high price, as just the acrylonitrile itself?two pounds of which are required for each pound of finished product?accounts for more than half of the production cost of carbon fiber. Fortunately, this issue is at the center of biomass research that aims to make significant cuts to costs and eventually to wean carbon-fiber production off oil entirely. Researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) last month announced that they have created a new catalytic process that is both compatible with renewable feedstocks and has a far better yield than the existing process?98 percent versus 80 to 83 percent. The research team estimates that, using cellulosic biomass (from wood, grasses, or even paper pulp) or sta...