Lighting a better path for biobased furans

Industrial biorefineries convert biomass to a variety of useful chemicals that help reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. Biorefineries that feed on woody, lignocellulosic biomass can produce furans, for example, but these aromatic molecules often require several additional steps to turn them into valuable downstream products. Benjamin List of the Max Planck Institute for Kohlenforschung and colleagues have now developed a light-driven catalytic method to hydrolyze furans, offering a more efficient way to exploit them in biorefineries (Science 2026, DOI: 10.1126/science.aec6532). “We want to make renewable chemistry much more accessible,” List says. “If these follow-up steps are practical and cheap, then it’s much more attractive for the chemical industry to start with sustainable material.” Bioderived furans are typically subjected to reduction or oxidation reactions to produce molecules such as succinic acid or 1,4-butanediol. Further redox reactions may then be required to turn those compounds into building blocks for the polymer industry, for example, which adds cost and complexity. It may be more efficient to avoid the redox roller coaster and instead directly hydrolyze the furans to make products in a single step. But the hydrolysis process that breaks open furan’s aromatic ring takes a lot of energy, and using heat tends to trigger unwanted furan polymerization. So List and his colleagues developed a process that uses blue light to power furan hydrolysis at room temperature. The reaction is helped by organic catalysts based on derivatives of acridine or riboflavin. This worked for furan itself, along with a range of alkyl-