In India, changing the process of producing biodiesel could help reduce tailpipe emissions of nanoparticles, contributing to improving air quality, according to a collaborative study by The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), the Finnish Meteorological Institute, and Tampere University, Finland. TERI, supported by the Department of Biotechnology (DBT) of GoI, and the Finnish research collaboration […]
In New Jersey, Yale researchers developed a catalyst that converts carbon dioxide and water into methanol using electricity. It’s a type of catalyst called a heterogeneous molecular electrocatalyst — “heterogeneous” because it’s a solid catalyst material operating in a liquid electrolyte, and “molecular” because the active site of the catalyst is a molecular structure. Researchers […]
In Illinois, scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory are conducting pivotal research that will help keep soil healthy now and into the future. Scientists have long known that corn residue or stover — meaning the aboveground portions of the corn plant remaining after harvest — plays a critical role in […]
In Colorado, the US National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded an additional $500,000 to DMC through its Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase IIB program. This is in addition to over $960,000 previously awarded to DMC by NSF through the SBIR Phase I and II programs. The additional funding will support the ongoing commercialization efforts […]
In Israel, scientists at the Weizmann Institute of Science were able to get bacteria to eat carbon dioxide from their environment – essentially building all of their biomass from air. This feat involved nearly a decade of rational design, genetic engineering and a sped-up version of evolution in the lab. The findings point to means […]
In the UK, breweries in the EU throw out around 3.4 million tons of unspent grain every year, weighing the equivalent of 500,000 elephants. Using just 1kg of the grain, a researcher from the School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering has been able to create enough activated carbon to spread across 100 football pitches. The results have […]
In Montana, a scientist at the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory has discovered that special proteins can keep microbes from colonizing inside fuel tanks and degrading the fuels–especially biodiesel. Contamination and degradation is especially problematic for biodiesel, which often contains fatty acid methyl esters that can be metabolized by microbial organisms. In support of the […]
In Tennessee, technology developed at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory and scaled up by Vertimass LLC to convert ethanol into fuels suitable for aviation, shipping and other heavy-duty applications can be price-competitive with conventional fuels while retaining the sustainability benefits of bio-based ethanol, according to a new analysis. ORNL worked with […]
In UK, a move towards a more sustainable bio-based economy has been given a new boost by researchers who have been able to simplify a process to transform waste materials into high value chemicals. A collaboration between the UK and Brazil has shown that waste sugar cane and wheat straw from agricultural processes can be […]
In South Korea, a research team from the School of Energy and Chemical Engineering at UNIST unveiled a novel biomass conversion technology, a fusion catalytic system that can selectively convert lignin, that can turn forestry biomass residues (i.e., sawdust from timber logging) into higher value fuels and chemicals via solar energy. At present, the process […]
