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ConocoPhillips inks $5 million research deal with Colorado Center for Biorefining and Biofuels

July 4, 2008

In Colorado, ConocoPhillips will provide $5 million in research support to the Colorado Center for Biorefining and Biofuels, under a multi-year agreement that will support research of advanced biofuels. The first project will focus on algae-based biofuels. C2B2 is a joint research effort by the University of Colorado at Boulder, Colorado State University, the Colorado School of Mines, and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) established in March 2007.

The Wall Street Journal has profiled the sharply increased tempo of activities of Bio Oil in the research and production of bio-oil, or bio-crude.

The current energy-transportation system “has been a hundred years and billions of dollars in the making,” Rick Zalesky, vice president for biofuels and hydrogen at Chevron’s alternative-energy arm told the Journal. “The ideal outcome of our research is to develop biomass-based transportation fuels that have chemical properties similar to those of gasoline and diesel,” he said. The profile covers efforts by Chevron, BP, Marathon, ConocoPhillips, and Shell to produce a viable alternative to petroleum that can utilize the existing oil company infrastructure.

Growing popularity of biocrude
The popularity of biocrude, or synthetic crude oil, 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 month 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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