Terragia Biofuel uses ORNL technology to produce biofuels from plant waste

In Tennessee, using technology developed by researchers working with the Center for Bioenergy Innovation at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Dartmouth College, startup company Terragia Biofuel is targeting commercial biofuels production that relies on plant waste material and consumes less energy. The technology can help meet the demand for billions of gallons of liquid biofuels for airplanes, ships and long-haul trucks.

New Hampshire-based Terragia plans to commercialize an approach that uses feedstocks such as plant-based lignocellulose — the tough, fibrous parts of plants that aren’t consumed as food — to make ethanol and other products at a much lower cost than today’s technology. The approach leverages bacteria that are good at digesting and converting plant waste in a one-step consolidated bioprocessing method without the addition of costly enzymes or thermochemical pretreatment currently used in conventional approaches to ethanol production.

The firm is advancing innovative approaches, including several licensed technologies resulting from work completed through the Center for Bioenergy Innovation, or CBI. CBI is a DOE Bioenergy Research Center that brings together about 250 scientists from 17 partner institutions, including Dartmouth and Terragia, to develop bioenergy-relevant plants, microbes and processing methods for biofuels production. CBI and its predecessor, the BioEnergy Science Center, or BESC, have generated nearly 40 patents for biofuels technologies that are available for licensing. 

Terragia’s technology uses engineered bacteria such as Clostridium thermocellum that thrive at high temperatures and accomplish, in a single process, the release of soluble sugars from plant waste and fermentation of those sugars to make ethanol or other biofuels. The consolidated bioprocessing occurs without the addition of oxygen and has documented potential to substantially reduce capital costs and process energy inputs.