Energy Department announces $10m for bioenergy technologies

The Energy Department's Bioenergy Technologies Office (BETO) has chosen seven projects across the US to receive up to $10 million (€8.8 million) to support innovative technologies and solutions to help advance bioenergy development.

These projects will support BETO's work to develop renewable and cost-competitive biofuels from non-food biomass feedstocks by reducing the risk associated with potentially breakthrough approaches and technologies. They include:

• Metabolix (Cambridge, Massachusetts), in collaboration with North Carolina State University, will receive up to $2 million to develop a non-genetically modified, non-food feedstock, Camelina sativa, with significantly increased seed yield and oil content to maximise oil yields per acre, thereby enabling the widespread use of a currently underutilised non-food feedstock.

• Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (Richland, Washington), in collaboration with MicroBio Engineering, will receive up to $900,000 to develop a process to produce microalgae directly from CO2 in air at high productivities, thereby decoupling algal growth from CO2 sources.

• The Ohio State University (Columbus, Ohio), in collaboration with the University of Alabama and Green Biologics, will receive up to $1.2 million to develop a cellulosic butanol production process with high productivities, yields, and carbon conversion through novel metabolic engineering of two different pathways.

• The University of California, Riverside (Riverside, California), in collaboration with the University of Tennessee-Knoxville and CogniTek, will receive up to $1 million to further develop a co-solvent pretreatment for high yields of clean fuel precursor fractions that can significantly improve downstream chemical catalytic upgrading to final biofuel additives.

• OPX Biotechnologies (Boulder, Colorado) will receive up to $2 million to develop the production of cost-competitive C8 fatty acid derivatives (which can readily be converted to high-performance lubricants and synthetic oils) from cellulosic sugars via novel metabolic engineering pathways.

• Kiverdi (Berkeley, California), in collaboration with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, will receive up to $2 million to further develop processes and genetic tools to produce hydrocarbons in previously unengineered bacteria that directly utilize biomass-derived syngas for growth.

• The Gas Technology Institute (Des Plaines, Illinois), in collaboration with W.R. Grace and Company and Michigan Technological University, will receive up to $1.4 million to develop a process to catalytically convert biomass and methane into hydrocarbon liquid fuels and chemicals at high yields, while simultaneously decreasing hydrogen consumption.#

 

SOURCE: US Department of Energy