In Washington state, while relentless bright light brings many forms of cyanobacteria to their knees — figuratively, of course — Synechococcus sp. PCC 7002 does the opposite, thriving and growing at a rate that far outpaces most of its peers. That makes the organism, commonly called a form of blue-green algae, an attractive target for […]
In Pennsylvania, Gov. Tom Wolf signed a law on July 20 allowing the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture and institutions of higher education to grow hemp (Cannabis sativa L.) for research purposes. Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences is working with the state department of agriculture to develop the policies, procedures and applications needed to facilitate […]
In New York state, Cornell University biological engineers have deciphered the cellular strategy to make the ethanol, using an anaerobic microbe feeding on carbon monoxide. To make biofuel from inorganic, gaseous industrial rubbish, the researchers learned that the bacterium Clostridium ljungdahlii responds thermodynamically – rather than genetically – in the process of tuning favorable enzymatic […]
In Spain, a consortium of six R&D centers in the Basque Autonomous Community, Navarre and France -NEIKER-Tecnalia, National Centre of Renewable Energies (CENER), Tecnalia Research & Innovation, Association of Industry of Navarre (AIN), Association for the Environment and Safety in Aquitaine (APESA) and the Centre for the Application and Transformation of Agro-resources (CATAR-CRITT)- are participating […]
In Washington, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, in partnership with Argonne National Laboratory, opened the application process to select the first national cohort of innovators for Chain Reaction Innovations. CRI is the second energy and science technology accelerator to open at a national laboratory and the first one located in the Midwest, […]
In California, researchers at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and Sandia National Laboratories (Sandia) working at the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) have demonstrated that adding carbon dioxide (CO2) gas during the deconstruction phase of biofuel production successfully neutralized the toxicity of ionic liquids, the room-temperature molten salt solvent used at […]
In Texas, the U.S. Department of Energy has granted $2.5 million for a Texas A&M AgriLife Research study to find ways to use biorefinery waste to make new, marketable products. Researchers will focus much of the three-year study on ways to make plastic materials from the lignin waste. His lab has other energy department grants […]
In Florida, Alliance BioEnergy Plus, Inc. announced that as the scientific and engineering team at subsidiary Ek Laboratories continues to optimize the CTS process for dry distiller’s grain (DDG) and various other cellulose biomass, the team has developed a pathway to produce JP-8, an advanced military grade aviation biofuel, at the suggestion of government officials […]
In Florida, new research examines how genetic improvement of specific sorghum traits, with an eye toward sustainability, could help maximize the usefulness of sorghum as a bioenergy crop. The work was conducted by researchers from the University of Florida in Gainesville, Washington State University in Pullman, the USDA-ARS in Lincoln, Nebraska, and the University of […]
In Germany, Professor Michael Melkonian and a team from the University of Cologne have developed a new method that could make the production of algae easier – and hence reduce the costs of the products based on this material. Their findings are published in the journal Trends in Biotechnology. The “Porous Substrate Bioreactor” (PSBR), also […]
