America generates very large quantities of biogas; in total, almost 10% of America’s gasoline consumption in terms of energy equivalent volumes. The largest sources of methane are landfills, followed by wastewater and then manure. It’s an atmospheric problem and a carbon opportunity and in recent years Iogen, one of the world’s cellulosic ethanol pioneers, has […]
Does 1+1=3? That’s the premise of this ABLC 2018 presentation from LEC’s John Forcier which looks at the challenges and opportunities in anaerobic digesters. There’s a significant energy gain (3 to 10 times manure/sludge only) from adding appropriate feedstocks, Forcier says — and his illuminating overview of the promise and progress with advanced digester systems was a […]
The DOE is supporting a project to develop engineered clostridia strains and fermentation process that can directly utilize cellulose and fix CO2 for n-butanol production from lignocellulosic biomass. The engineered strains can be used in fermentation to produce n-butanol from lignocellulosic biomass at a targeted cost of $2.25/gal or less than $3/gge (gallon gasoline equivalent). This […]
Why characterize biomass? Lignocellulosic biomass is a complex biopolymer and its properties vary depending on its species, growth environments and conversion processes. Characteristics of biomass provide valuable insights for biomass utilization. Diverse characterization methods have been developed to elucidate physicochemical, thermal and morphological properties of biomass and its products. Art Ragauskas of The University of Tennessee‐Knoxville (and Oak Ridge) and Hugh Michael O’Neill and Timothy J. Tschaplinski of […]
Source Integration has developed a technology that creates a 12x surface area for a 12x algae harvest and expects expects an optimized production of 8 – 10 times plain algae raceway for same (water/land) surface area. Source — which aims at discussing licensing, joint ventures or other business arrangements for this technology — prepared this illuminating […]
What’s the latest with carbon fiber? The US Department of Energy is supporting a project to develop and demonstrate an acrylonitrile (bio-ACN) production process from biomass-derived sugars at ≤ $1/lb. Additionally, the team led by NREL’s Adam Bratis aims to demonstrate suitability of bio-ACN for the production of carbon fiber relative to conventional practices . […]
The US Department of Energy is supporting a project led by Novozymes that proposes to deliver a screening platform which can be used to reduce discovery time required for tailoring enzymes to process specific contexts. It’s called SynTec — Synthetic Biology for Tailored Enzyme Cocktails — and its one of the signature synbio developments with immediate applications to the […]
The objective? To create an economically viable process for the production of butanol from the underutilized natural resources domestically available economically sustainable biofuel at or below DOE target selling price. And, suitable for roll-out in multiple regions containing agricultural residues and underutilized forest residuals. Not to mention, able to compete in the butanol market without subsidy. The Department […]
You know what they say, “you can make anything you want from lignin except money.” It’s the most challenging issues in biofuel production: upgrading the lignin-containing biorefineryresidues to fungible bioproducts, in an affordable, effective, scalable way. The US Department of Energy is supporting a project to develop a viable bioprocess to convert biorefinerywaste to bioplastics […]
Can it be done? That is, development of a sustainable green chemistry platform for production of acetone and downstream drop-in fuel and commodity products directly from biomass syngas via a novel energy conserving route in engineered acetogenic bacteria? It’s not only the longest title of a bioeconomy project in history, it’s a potentially history-making process […]
