In Washington, the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Bioenergy Technologies Office (BETO) announced the launch of its Chemical Catalysis for Bioenergy Consortium (ChemCatBio), a research and development consortium dedicated to identifying and overcoming catalysis challenges for biomass conversion processes. Made up of seven DOE national laboratories, ChemCatBio will bring new catalytic materials to commercial bioenergy […]
In Pennsylvania, a Penn State professor was hired by World Agroforestry Centre to help a small company, Eco Fuels Kenya, or EFK, to survey subsistence farmers in five counties and dozens of villages in Kenya about their willingness to grow croton trees. He asked them such things as how many trees they have, whether they […]
In India, IIT-Kharagpur researchers have developed a process that results in four-fold increase in the yield of fermentable sugars and bioethanol from hemicelluloses, allowing feedstocks like grasses and lake hyacinth to finally become viable feedstocks. Lake hyacinth is 50% hemicellulose, for example, so a kilo of dry feedstock can now produce 0.18-0.29kg of ethanol. Research […]
In California, farmers from the Midwest are in California’s Central Valley touring the first-of-its-kind Zero Net Energy Farm, or “ZNEF,” to learn how to generate all electrical and heating power needs from on-site renewable resources, including solar, wind and biomass. Renewable energy company Biodico Inc. directs the ZNEF project, which is funded, in part, by […]
In Puerto Rico, a new study published last week in the journal Environmental Research Letters by researchers at the University of Puerto Rico offers the first regional look at lands being converted to palm oil plantations in Latin America. Palm oil is a primary ingredient in processed foods, soaps, cosmetics, and biofuel. Growth of the […]
In Minnesota, a team of researchers led by the University of Minnesota has invented a new technology to produce automobile tires from trees and grasses in a process that could shift the tire production industry toward using renewable resources found right in our backyards. The car tires produced from biomass that includes trees and grasses […]
In Massachusetts, MIT engineers have genetically reprogrammed a strain of yeast so that it converts sugars to fats much more efficiently, an advance that could make possible the renewable production of high-energy fuels such as diesel. The researchers modified the metabolic pathways of yeast that naturally produce large quantities of lipids, to make them about […]
In Illinois, researchers at Western Illinois University are using gene editing on pennycress in an attempt to reduce seed shattering, among other traits, that will make the winter annual more viable for biodiesel feedstock, allowing soy farmers to grow an extra crop. Changing the color of flowers to yellow is also high on the gene […]
In Washington, the US Energy Information Agency released its February Short-Term Energy Outlook (STEO), and reported that implied global petroleum and liquid fuels inventories are estimated to have increased by 0.8 million barrels per day (b/d) in 2016. EIA expects the oil market to be relatively balanced in 2017 and 2018, with inventory draws averaging […]
In Canada, Ecostrat has released a white paper explaining the relevance of the latest developments in biomass supply chain research and analytics to industry developers and lenders. It serves as an introduction to important feedstock supply chain de-risking concepts: from risk analysis methods to actual procurement strategies. Biomass supply risk is one of the reasons […]
