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USDA awards $492,000 to Baylor to study cellulosic ethanol inhibitors

May 23, 2008

In Texas, The US Department of Agriculture awarded a $492,000 grant to Baylor University to study the by-products created when making cellulosic ethanol and how many of those by-products may restrict the fermenting process.

Baylor researchers hope to learn how to minimize the inhibitory effects of those by-products, thus reducing the cost to produce ethanol. “The goal is to try to make the production of cellulosic ethanol cost-competitive to petroleum and this research will help lay the groundwork,” said Dr. Kevin Chambliss, associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry at Baylor, who is leading the study. “We have already identified about 40 compounds that could be inhibitory and now we are going back through to check other compounds that are present and see how inhibitory they really are.”

The USDA has been increasing its support for energy research, awarding $840,000 last month to a Washington State University research team to develop means of generating phenols in poplar trees. Phenols have similar properties to petrochemicals.

In Iowa, the USDA and Department of Energy announced a $944,000 grant to support a project at Iowa State using fast pyrolysis, gasification and nanotechnology based catalyzation to produce ethanol. Project director Victor Lin, a professor of chemistry and director of the Center for Catalysis, told Science News said that research into catalysts slowed in the 1990s over issues of controlling reactions and productivity. The new catalysts are solid nanospheres with honeycomb channels, loaded with a metallic catalyst and other species.

Growing popularity of biocrude
The popularity of biocrude, and fuels made using the fast pyrolysis process, has been increasing rapidly in recent months as policymakers and investors struggle to solve the increasing infrastructure and land-use issues of first-generation biofuels and feedstocks.

“By using waste, [it] overcomes the food versus fuel debate which surrounds biofuels generated from grains, corn and sugar,” says Dr. Stephen Loffler of CSIRO, Australia’s national science laboratory. CSIRO recently announced the development of a second-generation biocrude process, in conjunction with researchers at Monash University.

The announcement earlier this year by Sustainable Power and Borneo Oil to develop 20 bioreactors in Malaysia is the most significant international expansion announced to date in biocrude production. Startup companies such as LS9, UOP, Syntroleum and the LiveFuels consortium have firmly entrenched themselves as the second wave of biocrude development, behind Sustainable Power.

“It’s a trend,” said Will Thurmond, author of Biodiesel 2020, and a leading authority on global biomass development. “The Chinese, among others, see biocrude as a 1.5 generation biofuel that, gets us out of many of the problems associated with first generation fuels, and while we are waiting for second-generation fuels like cellulosic ethanol.”

Numerous entrants into biocrude development
The LiveFuels consortium “is a national alliance of labs and scientists dedicated to transforming algae into biocrude by 2010″, according to the consortium’s website. The scientific alliance will be led by Sandia National Laboratories, a U.S. Department of Energy National Laboratory. The alliance is expected to sponsor dozens of labs and hundreds of scientists by the year 2010.

“We believe Sandia has the strengths needed to lead the alliance in its early growth phase,” said Lissa Morgenthaler-Jones, CEO of LiveFuels. “Sandia is a DOE laboratory managed by the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), and possesses expertise in process engineering, biocience and biotechnology. Sandia is also home to the DOE Combustion Research Facility, a unique science and engineering user facility which can test the combustion characteristics of the biocrude produced by the LiveFuels alliance.”

LS9 was cofounded by molecular geneticists Dr. George Church of Harvard University and Dr. Chris Somerville of the University of California. LS9’s technology uses designer enzymes to convert fatty acid intermediates into petroleum replacement products via fermentation of renewable sugars. LS9 was recently honored at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland for its work in biocrude.

UOP, a division of Honeywell, announced last June that it expected to develop military aviation jet fuel, using a synthetic biocrude made from algae. The UOP project is backed by $6.7 million in funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). UOP is working with Honeywell Aerospace, Cargill, Arizona State University, Sandia National Laboratories and Southwest Research Institute on the project.

The National Renewable Energy Labortatory (NREL), in Golden, Colorado, re-started its algae research project last October in partnership with Chevron, although it is not clear whether NREL will explore biocrude as an alternative to algae-based biodiesel. NREL ran an project exploring the development of biodiesel from algae between 1978 and 1996.

ConocoPhillips and Archer Daniels Midland Company announced last September that they would collaborate on the development of renewable transportation fuels from biomass. The ConocoPhillips process— similar to one under investigation by Neste Oil, converts oils and fats to a synthetic, hydrocarbon diesel fuel that burns cleaner and has a reduced aromatic content than conventional diesel, but meets existing specifications for the fuel. ConocoPhillips also funded an eight-year, $22.5 million research project at Iowa State University, with a focus on conversion of biomass to fuel through fast pyrolysis.

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    Written by Jim Lane · Filed Under Research 

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