In Germany, over the past four and a half years, an EU project involving the University of Augsburg has explored the potential of environmentally friendly building materials, insulation foams or fuels from agricultural and forestry waste. The results also show how much a holistic view is needed when using them in order to avoid undesirable […]
In Belgium, a new paper by the European Biogas Association mapped the opportunities of producing biogas from industrial wastewaters and quantified the biogas production potential of different EU industry sectors. The results show that biogas has a high potential to mitigate methane emissions from wastewater whilst at the same time providing a huge potential source […]
In the UK, new study shows miscanthus can be grown in lower agricultural grade conditions – such as marginal land – due to their remarkable resilience and photosynthetic capacity at low temperatures. With very little known about its productivity in flooded and moisture-saturated soil conditions, researchers at the Earlham Institute in Norwich wanted to understand […]
In California, teams from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and Sandia National Laboratories have collaborated to develop a streamlined and efficient process for converting woody plant matter like forest overgrowth and agricultural waste – material that is currently burned either intentionally or unintentionally – into liquid biofuel. Their research was published recently in the […]
In Australia, researchers at the Queensland University of Technology will receive A$366,516 to research the production of renewable biosilica fillers from rice husks for application in rubber composites. “This project aims to address a significant problem in polymer composite synthesis by using rice husk to produce high performance bioderived hybrid silica fillers,” said Associate Professor […]
In North Carolina, researchers from North Carolina State University, in conjunction with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, are seeking to turn a waste product of pulp and paper mills known as “paper sludge” into a high-performance biofuel. The three-year grant is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Bioenergy Technologies Office and provides the researchers […]
In Germany, a European project with the participation of the University of Hohenheim called “Marginal lands for Growing Industrial Crops”, MAGIC for short, aims at developing the enormous potential of around 65 million hectares of agricultural land in Europe that are hardly or not at all usable for conventional agriculture and see how bioenergy industrial […]
In France, functioning of the enzyme FAP, useful for producing biofuels and for green chemistry, has been decrypted. This result mobilized an international team of scientists, including many French researchers from the CEA, CNRS, Inserm, École Polytechnique, the universities of Grenoble Alpes, Paris-Saclay and Aix Marseille, as well as the European Synchrotron (ESRF) and synchrotron […]
In Nebraska, University of Nebraska–Lincoln researchers affiliated with the Daugherty Water for Food Global Institute have received a $3 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to better quantify carbon sequestration and greenhouse gas emissions connected with corn production fields in the Midwest. The high-tech effort is included in the first phase of the […]
In Colorado, a startup founded by an emeritus researcher at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has moved closer to commercializing technology he helped develop at the U.S. Department of Energy facility. The company, Polaris Renewables, is the first business to directly spin off from NREL since 1992. Philip Pienkos, who retired in April 2020, […]
