Angew. Chem. Int. Edn doi: 10.1002/anie.200802879 (2008)

Tough, chewy parts of plants and even wood can be tapped for their fuel by dissolving them in an ionic liquid and then passing them over a solid acid catalyst, report Ferdi Schüth and his co-workers at the Max Planck Institute for Coal Research in Mülheim an der Ruhr, Germany. Specifically, a liquid made of an alkylmethylimidazolium salt dissolves woodchips. This allows the cellulose to be selectively hydrolysed when it passes through pores of a resin that contains sulphonic groups, generating sugars and smaller cellulose fragments.

The acidic resins needed to break down the cellulose are already commercially available, making the process easy to apply on a large scale.