BioCircular Valley launched to boost bioeconomy from San Joaquin Valley ag waste

In California, in Northern San Joaquin Valley, agricultural leftovers such as almond shells, fruit peels, and orchard trimmings can potentially be converted into sustainable bioproducts and biofuels – with the right technology. This week, Schmidt Sciences’ Virtual Institute on Feedstocks of the Future awarded new funding to a group investigating how to make better use of the diverse agricultural waste in the region.

The group, “Building the Circular Bioeconomy in the North San Joaquin Valley” or BioCircular Valley, is co-led by the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), UC Berkeley, and BEAM Circular, with partners at UC Merced, UC Agriculture and Natural Resources, the Almond Board of California, and USDA Albany Agricultural Research Station.

One of the group’s goals is to build a publicly accessible database and user-friendly map full of information about different feedstocks, the raw plant materials and biomass that can be broken down and used to make bioproducts. That includes where feedstocks are located, when they are available, how they are currently disposed of, how they perform in different bioreactors, how much sugar or lignin they contain, whether they can be processed with other feedstocks, their greenhouse gas footprint, the potential cost, and much more.

The project will also test ways to improve the flexibility of the conversion process, which breaks down feedstocks to prepare them to make bioproducts. Researchers will apply artificial intelligence to their lab-generated data to improve predictions of how feedstocks can be processed most efficiently or blended together. Being able to use the same technique on different (or mixed) kinds of plant matter would open up ways for companies to make bioproducts more easily.