In Washington, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) announced its intent to issue, on behalf of the Bioenergy Technologies Office, a funding opportunity announcement (FOA) entitled “Advancements in Algal Biomass Yield, Phase 2 (ABY2).” This FOA will support projects to develop technologies that are likely to succeed in […]
In Washington state, Washington State University researchers have developed a catalyst that easily converts bio-based ethanol to a widely used industrial chemical, paving the way for more environmentally friendly, bio-based plastics and products. The researchers have published a paper online describing the catalyst in the Journal of the American Chemical Society (http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jacs.5b07401) and have been […]
BCC Research has released Global Markets and Technologies for Biofuel Enzymes, which forecasts a five-year compound annual growth rate of 10.4% from 2015-2020, leading to a global market size of $1 billion in the end year. The report explores present and future strategies within the biofuel enzymes market, which includes amylase, cellulose, xylanase, lipase and […]
In Texas, Wayne Versaw, Associate Professor at Texas A&M University in College Station is the lead researcher in a $1.2 million grant from the Department of Energy to support the development of biosensors to track and measure the movement of phosphate from soil fungi into plant cells in real time. The biosensor system will provide […]
In Massachusetts, University of Massachusetts Amherst computational chemist Scott Auerbach has been awarded a three-year, $330,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to improve basic understanding and optimize the process of producing fuels such as gasoline from plant biomass instead of from petroleum. For more than 50 years, Auerbach explains, chemists and chemical engineers have […]
In Illinois, the University of Illinois has estimates from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), indicate that U.S. production of fuel ethanol totaled 14.313 billion gallons during the 2014 calendar year. That is 1.02 billion gallons more than produced in 2013 and about 384 million gallons more than the previous record production in 2011. For […]
In California, the state has not taken full advantage of opportunities to increase its in-state production of biofuel, despite state policies that encourage biofuel consumption, according to a report by the Climate Change and Business Research Initiative at the UCLA and UC Berkeley law schools. Coming on the heels of new Environmental Protection Agency rules […]
In Wisconsin, researchers have developed a new method for making interspecies yeast hybrids in the lab, making hybrids at rates of one in a thousand cells. The research team related its results in a special synthetic biology issue of the journal Fungal Genetics and Biology. It is much more efficient than nature. The new yeast […]
In New York state, a research team led by William Jones at the University of Rochester has developed a series of reactions that results in the selective conversion of ethanol to butanol, without producing unwanted byproducts. Jones was able to increase the amount of ethanol converted to butanol by almost 25 percent over currently used […]
In New Jersey, Picatinny engineers have partnered with private industry to harness its photosynthesis ability to develop a safe, cheap, fast and environmentally-friendly way to recycle aging M6 artillery round propellant and create biofuel. Propellant is the chemical substance in the artillery round that ignites and propels the round out of the howitzer tube. Currently, […]
