An organization well worth knowing in the world of biogas, or renewable methane, is the indefatigable group organized as IEA Bioenergy Task 37, an international working group which covers the anaerobic digestion of biomass feedstocks including agricultural residues, energy crops, organic-rich waste waters, the organic fraction of municipal of solid waste and industrial organic wastes. The main interests […]
It matters of course, what people think about bioenergy, not just the makers and political folk or offtakers, but the broader groups as well in what is called elsewhere ‘civil society’, amongst pressure groups, and ordinary customers at the pump or retail store. The measurement of attitudes is a difficult one, and here’s some science […]
For some time it’s been widely thought amongst the Digestsceni that there a need to ‘demonstrate to market actors and policy makers how existing bioenergy chains can be made more fuel flexible, efficient and cost effective through the application of (a combination of) pretreatment technologies,” and along cmes this project team and a presentation to […]
First comes the techno-economic assessment, then comes the deployment, as perhaps someone once said, or should have. For the road to bioeconomy passes through the graces of a successful evalutation of the inputs anf the outputs and the costs and values thereof. Those thoughtful assessors are a TEA Party anyone can get behind. And as […]
Several of the better known IEA Bioenergy rock stars — there are four and possibly five in this set, from the US and Canada, so we’ll put them somrt of on a par with Neil Young and Crazy Horse for representing somethng tuneful, must-know and American-Canadian in character. In this case, our research team led […]
Pacific Ethanol is a leading producer and marketer of low-carbon renewable fuels and high-quality alcohol products, and in some ways more importantly, they are a beacon for us to understand the future of pure-play ethanol and protein companies, going forward. Among the major players are mostly privately-held concerns, major integrated ag or oil & gas companies, […]
Wouldn’t it be great if we could boost fermentation of high-toxicity biomass hydrolysates? Well, folks are working on this via enhanced biocatalytic tolerance. At the recent DOE BETO 2019 Project Peer Review, Felix Lam and Gregory Stephanopoulos from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, shared how they are working on a yeast bioprocess that is tolerant to […]
Drop-in fuels from syngas are in. Syngas feedstocks are relatively inexpensive and diverse, thermophiles have several unique advantages, and end products have value as fuel and solvent applications among others. Sounds like win, win, win, right? But the big question that Kiverdi and NREL are working on right now are how to develop recombinant thermophilic […]
As frustrated as you may get with your pet sometimes, we aren’t talking about upcycling dogs and cats here, but PET (polyethylene terephthalate) plastic that is typically landfilled. One group at NREL and ORNL are working on developing cost-effective biological methods to better breakdown and upcycle PET. At the recent DOE BETO 2019 Project Peer […]
The industry is always on the look for microbial pathways that are capable of producing high carbon efficiency intermediates that are amenable to economic bioconversion, separation, and catalytic upgrading to hydrocarbon fuels and chemicals. At the recent DOE BETO 2019 Project Peer Review, Min Zhang and Michael Himmel from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, shared […]
