In Washington state, when the coronavirus pandemic thrust the world into turmoil last year, a group of bioenergy researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) saw an unconventional way to fight the pandemic: algae. What followed was a deep dive into the literature linking algae and antivirals as far back as 1956. To make sense […]
In the UK, infiltration by willow trees could be the answer to a growing waste problem, producing clean water, renewable biofuels and ‘green’ chemicals. In Canada, Canada, six trillion liters of municipal wastewater are partially treated and released into the environment each year, while another 150 billion liters of untreated sewage are discharged straight into […]
In Ohio, the U.S. Department of Energy awarded The University of Toledo a $3.2 million grant to continue advancing technology that speeds up the capture of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to grow algae, a critical part of the process of turning algae into biofuel. It’s part of $34 million announced by the Bioenergy Technologies […]
In Washington, in their ongoing effort to make carbon capture more affordable, researchers at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have developed a method to convert captured carbon dioxide (CO2) into methane, the primary component of natural gas. By streamlining a longstanding process in which CO2 is converted to methane, the researchers’ new […]
In Tennessee, for decades, biologists have believed a key enzyme in plants had one function—produce amino acids, which are vital to plant survival and also essential to human diets. But for researchers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, this enzyme does more than advertised. They had run a series of experiments on poplar plants that […]
In New Jersey, Princeton researchers have developed a new way to make fuel from cellulose speeding up a notoriously long and slow chemical process and in some cases doubling energy yields over comparable methods. Their platform uses a recently developed cellulose emulsion that makes it easier to metabolize the compound into other chemicals. Combining that […]
In Alabama, supported by a $2 million U.S. Department of Energy award issued in 2018, as well as funding from the USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture, insights from the project were recently highlighted by the journal Nature Communications — for obvious reasons. Despite tremendous investment over the past decades, developing viable efficient bioprocesses that […]
In Brazil, Xanthomonas citri, the bacterium that causes citrus canker, is a notorious “villain” among citrus growers but can be an ally in the manufacturing of biorenewables such as ethanol, dyes, plastics, and other chemicals currently derived from petroleum. A study published in June in the journal Nature Communications by researchers at the Brazilian Center for Research in Energy […]
In Colorado, a National Renewable Energy Laboratory duo known for pushing the limits of power-to-gas is innovating another direction for renewable hydrogen, focused on upcycling carbon waste streams into key energy products. The NREL team is focused on tightly integrating two processes—renewable hydrogen production and downstream chemical reactions—to cut the capital costs and improve the […]
In Maryland, a professor in the Department of Environmental Science and Technology at the University of Maryland (UMD), is leading two new grants totaling $6 million from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to develop sustainable products like biofuels and bioplastics from food waste. With about a third of the food produced in the U.S. […]
