The Centre’s research activities will encompass many different stages of bioenergy production, from widening the range of materials that can be the starting point for bioenergy to improving the crops used by making them grow more efficiently to changing plant cell walls. The Centre will also analyse the complete economic and environmental life cycle of potential sources of bioenergy.

The six hubs are:

• BSBEC Cell Wall Lignin Program. Improving barley straw for lignin production and transferring the new knowledge to other crops. Lignin is a polymer in plants that makes it difficult to access sugars for bioenergy production. The program aims to alter lignin properties in barley to make it easier to produce bioenergy without reducing the quality of the crop.

  University of Dundee with associated program members: University of York; SCRI; RERAD

• BSBEC Cell Wall Sugars program. Developing strategies to improve plants and enzymes for increased sugar release from biomass. The program aims to better understand how sugars are locked into plant cell walls to enable selection of the right plants and the right enzymes to release the maximum amount of sugars for conversion to biofuels.

  University of Cambridge with associated program members: Newcastle University; Novozymes

• BSBEC Lignocellulosic Conversion to Bioethanol (LACE) program. Using agricultural and wood-industry wastes to create biofuels. The program is aiming to optimize the release of sugars from plant cell walls to produce a fermentable material to produce fuels. It will also work on microbes to efficiently turn the material into fuel.

  University of Nottingham with associated program members: University of Bath; University of Surrey; BP; Bioethanol Ltd; Briggs of Burton; British Sugar; Coors Brewers; DSM; Ethanol Technology; HGCA; Pursuit Dynamics; SABMiller; Scottish Whisky Research Institute

• BSBEC Marine Wood Borer Enzyme Discovery program. New enzymes for the conversion of non-food plant biomass into biofuels from marine wood borers. Wood and straw contain polysaccharides that if converted to simple sugars could be fermented into biofuels. Marine wood borers consume huge amounts of woody material and their guts have all the enzymes needed to break it down. The program aims to exploit this.

  University of York with associated program members: University of Portsmouth; Syngenta Biomass Traits Group

• BSBEC Perennial Bioenergy Crops program. Optimizing biomass yield and composition for sustainable biofuels. The program aims to improve yields of fast growing trees and grasses and to make more of the plants’ carbon available for conversion into biofuels and to do this without increasing inputs such as fertilizers.

  Rothamsted Research with associated program members: Institute of Biological, Environmental and Rural Sciences (IBERS); Imperial College London; University of Cambridge; Ceres

• BSBEC Second Generation Sustainable, Bacterial Biofuels program. Optimizing production of the more effective second generation biofuel biobutanol from non-food biomass. Biobutanol is a superior biofuel to ethanol but currently available microbes used in biobutanol production processes are inefficient, produce unwanted by-products and cannot use plant cell walls directly as a feed material. The program aims to generate and test new bacterial strains to overcome this.

  University of Nottingham with associated program members: Newcastle University; TMO Renewables

Resources

• BBSRC Sustainable Bioenergy Centre Information Pack