GCEP Awards $1.15 Million for Biofuels and Carbon Sequestration Research
25 October 2006
The Global Climate and Energy Project (GCEP) has awarded $1.15 million to four research projects into biofuel production and coal utilization with carbon sequestration.
GCEP, which is administered at Stanford University, is a collaborative scientific and engineering effort of academic research institutions and industry. Its purpose is to conduct fundamental, pre-commercial research that will permit the development of global energy solutions with significantly lower greenhouse gas emissions. The GCEP sponsors—ExxonMobil, GE, Schlumberger and Toyota—intend to invest $225 million over a decade or more in the project.
The new efforts bring the total number of GCEP-supported research programs to 32 with funding of approximately $46.6 million since the project&rsqo;s launch in December 2002.
The four programs receiving awards are:
Microbial Synthesis of Biodiesel. Professor Chaitan Khosla at Stanford is leading an effort to genetically engineer a specific bacterium to improve biodiesel production. The resulting organisms would take in a stream of biomass carbon and produce long-chain hydrocarbon fuel.
Technology Potential of Biofuels: Feasibility Assessment. Professors Christopher Field and Rosamond Lee Naylor are developing an approach to obtain reasonable quantitative estimates of the total biomass resource that is sustainably available and the costs of producing this biomass for energy.
Integration of Coal Energy Conversion with Aquifer-Based Carbon Sequestration. There are two exploratory projects from two universities collaborating on this effort led, respectively, by Associate Professor Reginald Mitchell at Stanford and by Professors Larry Baxter and Dale Tree at Brigham Young University.
In these efforts, researchers are exploring the feasibility of developing a power plant that combines oxidation of coal using water at high temperature and pressure with storage of the resulting carbon dioxide and other waste products in deep underground saline aquifers.
There are developments in DME in China:
Currently, the market trend today is such that many Chinese coal chemical companies are moving towards optimising low cost and abundant coal feedstock for expansion into DME production.
If you would like to know more on COAL to Syngas to DME developments, join us at upcoming North Asia DME / Methanol conference in Beijing, 27-28 June 2007, St Regis Hotel. The conference covers key areas which include:
DME productivity can be much higher especially if
country energy policies makes an effort comparable to
that invested in increasing supply.
By:
National Development Reform Commission NDRC
Ministry of Energy for Mongolia
Production of DME/ Methanol through biomass
gasification could potentially be commercialized
By:
Shandong University completed Pilot plant in Jinan and
will be sharing their experience.
Advances in conversion technologies are readily
available and offer exciting potential of DME as a
chemical feedstock
By: Kogas, Lurgi and Haldor Topsoe
Available project finance supports the investments
that DME/ Methanol can play a large energy supply role
By: International Finance Corporation
For more information: www.iceorganiser.com,
Posted by: Cheryl Ho | 22 May 2007 at 09:04 PM