In Tanzania, the Mlingano Agriculture Research Institute will begin a sisal characterization program aimed to develop a protocol for the production of ethanol and citric acid from liquid effluents. The program comes under the proposed ten-year Sisal Crop Development Plan (2011-2020) to characterize available sisal species and document their potential for various by-products. The government […]
In England, University of York researchers, working with other researchers in the U.S. and Europe have a identified the molecular mechanism behind an enzyme found in fungi which can degrade the cellulose chains of plant cell walls to release shorter sugars for biofuels. They found a way of initiating effective oxidative degeneration of cellulose using […]
In the UK, Green Biologics and Songyuan Laihe Chemical announced a collaborative development and licensing agreement in China. Under the terms of the agreement GBL and Laihe will collaborate to improve the economics of Laihe’s biobutanol plant by optimising GBLs fermentation technology using sugars derived using Laihe cellulosic pre-treatment process. It is anticipated that the […]
In Colorado, researchers from Mississippi State University have discovered that microbes found in the feces of giant pandas can better breakdown the tough cellulose that has been in a barrier to cellulosic ethanol production. Presenting at the National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society in Denver, the researchers said the bacteria they found […]
In Illinois, researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have developed a new strain of yeast which ferments cellobiose and galactose simultaneously , hat will process seaweed into ethanol in half the time. Normally yeast won’t digest the galactose until all of the glucose is already processed, but the new development does both at the […]
In Missouri, the director of the University of Missouri’s Center for Agroforestry says that by planting biomass crops in the flood plains of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers rather than corn and soybeans that are currently planted there but are subject to failure, farmers won’t have to replant crops while biomass production would make the […]
In California, the U.S. Geological Survey reduced its estimate of “technically recoverable natural gas” from the Marcellus Shale formation, by 75 percent, to 84 trillion cubic feet, from a figure of 410 trillion cubic feet previously estimated by the Energy Information Administration. The Post Carbon Institute writes “our detailed new energy report, “Will Natural Gas […]
In Louisiana, Tulane University researchers have discovered a new bacterial strain that turns newspapers into butanol. The researchers are currently using old editions from “The Times-Picayune” as a feedstock for their bacterial strain named “TU-103” to produce the ethanol. Harshad Velenkar, a post doctoral researcher states, “In the United States alone, at least 323 million […]
In California, Codexis VP of Biochemistry and Engineering R&D James Lalonde said that in its program to develop customized carbonic anhydrase (CA) enzymes that could catalyze carbon capture under industrial conditions, CA performance has been improved by about two million fold over natural forms of the enzyme. Evolved CA enzymes are functional and stable, he […]
In Spain, a Chilean researcher at the Institute of Ocean Sciences at CSIC in Barcelona has narrowed down three species of marine algae that are common in most parts of the world as ideal for biofuel feedstock. Using existing production methods for algae however is unviable because compared to fossil diesel, the biomass production requires […]
