In Brazil, researchers at Parana Technological University have developed a prototype vehicle that can run more than 300km on a single liter of ethanol. The prototype vehicle can only carry a single passenger weighing less than 45kg, however. The fuel efficiency partly comes from not going very fast, so the team says it needs to […]
In Washington, the Department of Energy’s Small Business Vouchers program awarded $8 million worth of research vouchers to 43 small businesses, of which five were related to bioenergy: Avatar Sustainable Technologies, Syracuse, New York Avatar Sustainable Technologies will work with the with National Renewable Energy Laboratory to develop a method to economically use waste from […]
In Texas, the Process Engineering R&D Center, a part of the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station at Texas A&M, is offering a short course, entitled “Practical Short Course on Plant Operations and Process Engineering for Solvent and Biofuel Facilities,” Oct. 16-19 at Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas. The course objectives are to receive comprehensive […]
Yeast, they’re so small that they probably all look like twins, all work the same, do the same things. Not so, says DOE Joint Genome Insitute’s Robert Riley, who tells The Digest, “We might think of yeasts as simple unicellular, creatures similar to each other, but in fact their genetic diversity is like the difference […]
In California, a team of researchers from Belgium and the U.S. has identified the active site of an iron-containing catalyst that has raised hopes for designing a practically useful catalyst that might make converting methane to methanol a possibility. In their paper published in the journal Nature, the researchers describe their efforts, what they discovered […]
In Nigeria, the Petroleum Technology Development fund will set up a national coordination center for biofuel R&D at the National Institute for Policy and Strategic studies in Kaduna and has called on the national petroleum industry to provide support and funding to getting biofuel production to commercial scale in the country. One of the fund’s […]
In California, so far industry has only harnessed a fraction of the diversity available for biotechnological applications, including biofuel production. In the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team led by DOE Joint Genome Institute researchers aims to help boost the use of a wider range of yeasts. To help boost the use […]
In North Dakota, North Dakota ethanol producer Red Trail Energy, and the Energy & Environmental Research Center (EERC) have been awarded $490,000 by the North Dakota Industrial Commission’s Renewable Energy Program in support of a study examining the integration of carbon capture and storage (CCS) at RTE’s ethanol manufacturing facility near Richardton to reduce the […]
In Missouri, engineers at Washington University have found a new way to boost biofuel production in E. coli bacteria by altering its protein structure. Fuzhong Zhang, assistant professor in the Department of Energy, Environmental & Chemical Engineering, along with researchers in his lab, reported in the journal Metabolic Engineering that they have discovered a new method […]
In California, a US Navy research team at China Lake led by Ben Harvey reported that 2,3-Butanediol, which has received a significant amount of interest based on the ability to generate it at much higher titer than n-butanol owing tothe relatively low toxicity of 2,3-BD to the producing organism, “can be converted to butenes over bifunctional […]
