The US Department of Energy is supporting a project to identify and mitigate the challenges of moving new fuels and vehicles into markets. Including but not limited to: facilitating new fuel standards needed for introduction into the marketplace; identifying vehicle, distribution, and infrastructure compatibility of new candidate bio-blendstocks; interacting with all market sector stakeholders for […]
While we’ve been busy fleeing Hurricane Irma, it’s been a busy week for the techies running the Digest’s Very Large Gossip Array — the airwaves have been crackling as some familiar faces re-surface. Let’s review. Bayer, Ginkgo’s $100 Million Baby News just arrived from Germany that Bayer and Ginkgo Bioworks will create a new company […]
The US Department of Energy is supporting a project led by Pacific Northwest National Lab to develop a new deconstruction technology to provide low ash and low impurity sugars and sugar-derived intermediates from lignocellulosic feeds for use in catalytic and biochemical conversions. As the researchers note, “catalysis and biochemical conversions of sugars and sugar-derived compounds can produce open-chain hydrocarbon […]
For every ethanol blend everywhere these days, there seems to be a war on. A war in India over 22% blends. A war in Brazil over exactly what baseline blend ratio (somewhere int he 20s) is ideal. A war on in Europe to roll back first-gen ethanol to around 2% blending. A war in New […]
The US Department of Energy is supporting a project to develop a biological approach to depolymerize lignin for upgrading of aromatic compounds to co-products. Lignin valorization is key for meeting the DOE’s hydrocarbon fuel cost and sustainability targets in integrated biorefineries. Principal investigators Gregg Beckham at NREL and John Gladden at Sandia National Laboratory and […]
It’s been around for millions of years, algae. Why now? A combination of pressing human need, and scientific advancement — these two drivers are working not always on the same timeline, but roughly so. Algae’s arriving because a 9 billion global population is arriving by 2050, and the developing world is shifting to more protein […]
The US Department of Energy is supporting a project led by Michael Himmell at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory to develop technology to meet or exceed the target of 10 mg/g cellulose on pretreated feedstocks and feedstock blends. Attainment of this overall enzyme cost is consistent with BETO’s techno-economic evaluations for the 2022 biomass conversion […]
Maine is the Pine Tree state and yet in recent years the industries surrounding the noble pine have been in all kinds of distress, as readers have fled newspapers and magazines for digital reading. Now, Maine’s hardwoods have been in demand. The market for maple, yellow birch, and white ash hardwoods has been strong. The […]
The US Department of Energy is supporting a project to develop efficient and robust fungal biocatalysts and bioprocesses that utilize lignocellulose feedstocks to produce advanced biofuels and bioproducts at lower cost. Fungus — they know just about everything there is to know about robustly deconstructing biomass to capture the energy within — but what are […]
The US Department of Energy is supporting projects to investigate and recommend promising pathways for advanced biological upgrading of biomass sugars and lignin to hydrocarbons (HC) and co-products to support the DOE BETO 2022 goal of enabling advanced HC fuels at $3/GGE. In this project, a NREL-led research team is investigating the engineering of Zymomonasfor […]
