In Colorado, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory completed phase one of its Integrated Biorefinery Research Facility and are seeking partnerships with second generation biofuel pioneers. “The IBRF is designed specifically to help industry scale up their technology,” NREL Team Leader for Partnership Development John Ashworth said. “We have created an empty bay in the facility so […]
In Sweden, Lund University research Nadia Skorupa Parachin has extracted enzymes from garden soil to convert xylose, the world’s second most common sugar, to ethanol. If successful, ethanol production could possibly increase by 20%. Ms Skorupa Parachin explains, “In order for carbohydrates in forestry, plant and waste products to be used for ethanol production, enzymes […]
In Ohio, researchers at Ohio State University have developed a brand new process for producing polyurethane foam using crude glycerine as a feedstock for the polyoil. The product is 5%-10% cheaper than fossil fuel-based as well as other organic-based polyurethane foams. More on the story.
In Belgium, the European Commission has determined that average carbon emissions between 2004 and 2006 for airline flights reached 219 million metric tons and will therefore grant just under 213 million tons of allowances for 2012. Allowances will then fall to about 208.5 million tons every year after. The airline industry is required to participate […]
In Singapore, a new study released by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and the National University of Singapore says up to 6% of CO2-absorbing peatlands in Malaysia, Borneo, and Sumatra were converted to palm oil plantations by the early 2000s, leading to a decline in biodiversity (16 species of birds in Sumatra alone) and the […]
In Tennessee, researchers at the National Energy Technology Laboratory are concluding a three-year project using supercomputers at Oak Ridge and Argonne national laboratories for simulations to reduce the cost and time of building commercial-scale gasifiers. “High-performance computing is allowing us to reveal and study features of the gas-solids flow in a gasifier to a degree […]
In the Netherlands, Eindhoven University researcher Anna Sues calculated that “even if all available biomass in Europe is used in the most efficient possible way for the transport industry, a biofuels proportion of no more than 9.5% would be achievable,” and added that achieving such a goal is nowhere near achievable in practice. The researcher […]
In California, researchers led by assistant professor Michelle Chang at Berkeley have engineered bacteria to produce n-butanol at about 10 times the rate of competing microbes, in work that will be published in the Nature Chemical Biology. It has been long known that some Clostridium bacteria can naturally produce n-butanol. Other groups had been able […]
In Texas, researchers at Rice University have discovered that using fertilizer at the same rates as corn for food as corn for ethanol can actually make it more difficult for biofuels processing because that additional nitrogen speeds up the production of lignin—getting in the way of cellulosic ethanol production. The researchers found that lignin yields […]
In Tennessee, Oak Ridge National Laboratory is working on bringing supercomputer simulations and experimental results closer together by identifying common “fingerprints.” ORNL’s Jeremy Smith collaborated on devising a method that reconciles the different signals between experiments and computer simulations to strengthen analyses of molecules in motion. The research will be published in the Proceedings of […]
