For every ethanol blend everywhere these days, there seems to be a war on. A war in India over 22% blends. A war in Brazil over exactly what baseline blend ratio (somewhere int he 20s) is ideal. A war on in Europe to roll back first-gen ethanol to around 2% blending. A war in New […]
The US Department of Energy is supporting a project to develop a biological approach to depolymerize lignin for upgrading of aromatic compounds to co-products. Lignin valorization is key for meeting the DOE’s hydrocarbon fuel cost and sustainability targets in integrated biorefineries. Principal investigators Gregg Beckham at NREL and John Gladden at Sandia National Laboratory and […]
It’s been around for millions of years, algae. Why now? A combination of pressing human need, and scientific advancement — these two drivers are working not always on the same timeline, but roughly so. Algae’s arriving because a 9 billion global population is arriving by 2050, and the developing world is shifting to more protein […]
The US Department of Energy is supporting a project led by Michael Himmell at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory to develop technology to meet or exceed the target of 10 mg/g cellulose on pretreated feedstocks and feedstock blends. Attainment of this overall enzyme cost is consistent with BETO’s techno-economic evaluations for the 2022 biomass conversion […]
Maine is the Pine Tree state and yet in recent years the industries surrounding the noble pine have been in all kinds of distress, as readers have fled newspapers and magazines for digital reading. Now, Maine’s hardwoods have been in demand. The market for maple, yellow birch, and white ash hardwoods has been strong. The […]
The US Department of Energy is supporting a project to develop efficient and robust fungal biocatalysts and bioprocesses that utilize lignocellulose feedstocks to produce advanced biofuels and bioproducts at lower cost. Fungus — they know just about everything there is to know about robustly deconstructing biomass to capture the energy within — but what are […]
The US Department of Energy is supporting projects to investigate and recommend promising pathways for advanced biological upgrading of biomass sugars and lignin to hydrocarbons (HC) and co-products to support the DOE BETO 2022 goal of enabling advanced HC fuels at $3/GGE. In this project, a NREL-led research team is investigating the engineering of Zymomonasfor […]
The US Department of Energy is supporting a project to better manage seasonal variation in algal biomass production, through stabilization to reduce conversion costs, and to reduce ash to increase conversion yield. In this project led by Lynn Wendt and Bradley Wahlen at Idaho National Laboratory, researchers are working up a process that preserves harvested microalgal biomass over a […]
There’s one crossing worse than the Valley of Death and that is the Valley of NLACM. Although it sounds more like a goose trying to say “You’ll like him” — it’s the Natural Law of Alternative Commodity Markets, and it’s the biggest single impediment, globally, retarding the advance of renewable transport fuels as a world-scale […]
Special to The Digest At 758.8 million tonnes (503.6 million tonnes, milled basis), world paddy production in 2017 would stand 0.8 percent, or 5.8 million tons, above a revised estimate for 2016. The comparatively modest year-on-year increase mirrors constraints posed by tight margins and heightened competition with other crops, could entail a slow-down in […]
