In Texas, Texas A&M researchers are looking to scale up the process that occurs in the stomach of a cow, turning organic waste into vinegar—or in this case, organic acids from two to six carbons such as alcohols, esters, and others. Producing these bio-based chemical intermediates is intended to displace those currently supplied by fossil […]
In Wisconsin, researchers at the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center (GLBRC) discovered a method to break down solvent effects, finding a new way to measure and analyze how a solvent alters the stability of two different points of a chemical reaction, the initial state and the transition state. The method, which relies on experimentation and […]
In Wisconsin, for researchers at the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center (GLBRC), the central role of solvents in converting non-food biomass to biofuels and bioproducts means they’re ripe for optimization. Better use of solvents could improve the economics of biorefineries, push a range of new and more sustainable biofuels and bioproducts to market, and provide […]
In Oman, researchers from Sultan Qaboos University have successfully transformed waste paper including waste office paper, newspaper and cardboard paper into fermentable sugars by enzymatic hydrolysis that was later turned into ethanol and bioplastics as well as biodiesel. Paper waste represents more than 35% of the sultanate’s 1.6 million metric tons of MSW produced on […]
In Ohio, most people are cautious around gasoline and diesel for good reason, but some microbes love the stuff—especially biofuels that contain fatty acid derivatives. So, as the world tries to go “green,” it also has to consider the slime that such microbes leave behind, clogging up equipment and killing engines. An article in Chemical […]
In Missouri, researchers from Donald Danforth Plant Science Center studied the earliest stages the evolution of male and female sexes in a group of freshwater photosynthetic protists called volvocine green algae, which could have implications for breeding algae for biofuel applications. James Umen, Ph.D., a member of the Enterprise Rent-a-Car Institute for Renewable Fuels and […]
In Washington, a study from the Center for Agricultural and Rural Development (CARD) at Iowa State University found that action to cap Renewable Identification Number (RIN) prices in exchange for an RVP waiver allowing year-round sale of E15 would result in reduced ethanol consumption, a drop in corn prices, and an effective cut of 5% to […]
In Colorado, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory is seeking respondents to a survey to better understand the next generation biofuel industry as a whole and its contributions to the local and national economy. The survey is being conducted by Yimin Zhang (NREL) and Marshall Goldberg (MRG & Associates), a subcontractor for NREL, and individual responses […]
In Ireland, researchers from the University of Limerick have modified nanoporous gold electrodes using lactate oxidase and bilirubin oxidase to create a flexible enzymatic biofuel cell (FEBC) that could provide autonomous power supply for wearable electronic devices. The research used commercially available contact lenses to embed the FEBC and tested the device with both artificial […]
In Wisconsin, University of Wisconsin at Madison researchers are focusing on a class of reactions that break down biomass by dissolving it in a mixture of water, a cosolvent and an acid catalyst. By modeling how tens of thousands of atoms move and interact with each other, they showed that the cosolvent speeds up the […]
