DOE to issue incubator funding opportunity to help advance bioenergy development; algal biofuels a main focus
19 June 2015
The US Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (DOE EERE) intends (DE-FOA-0001343) to issue, on behalf of the Bioenergy Technologies Office (BETO), a funding opportunity announcement (DE-FOA-0001320) targeting innovative technologies and solutions to help advance bioenergy development. DOE anticipates posting the FOA in or around July 2015.
The incubator opportunity is intended to fund projects that will pursue research and development (R&D) not significantly represented in BETO’s current portfolio, as a way to support and explore innovative new approaches for integration into the Office’s future program plans. The FOA will seek to support projects that facilitate BETO’s goals in Algal Biofuels R&D; Feedstocks Supply and Logistics R&D; and Conversion Technologies R&D.
BETO’s mission is to engage in research and development (R&D) and demonstration activities at increasing scale to transform renewable biomass resources into commercially viable, high-performance biofuels, as well as bioproducts and biopower that enable biofuel production.
To accomplish this mission, BETO develops a strategic plan, or multi-year program plan, to identify the technical challenges and barriers that need to be overcome. These technical challenges and barriers form the basis for BETO to issue funding opportunities announcements (FOAs) for financial assistance awards in these specific areas. However, BETO recognizes that there may be novel and potentially disruptive ideas that do not necessarily satisfy the requirement of specific FOAs, yet still meet the goals and mission of BETO.
The Bioenergy Incubator Program is intended to identify these potentially impactful ideas that are not meaningfully addressed in BETO’s strategic plan or project portfolio. It is NOT intended to fund projects that are incremental improvements to current products or processes or established work in BETO’s strategic plan or current portfolio.
DOE anticipates that the FOA will have two topic areas.
Topic Area 1 will be open to all proposals that seek to develop novel, non-incremental technologies that facilitate the goals of BETO’s Algae platform, but are not represented in a significant way in the current Algae project portfolio.
Topic Area 2 will be open to all proposals that seek to develop novel, non-incremental technologies that facilitate the goals of BETO, but are not represented in a significant way in the current Feedstocks or Conversion project portfolios.
The FOA will describe areas of non-interest (that is, areas that BETO is funding in a significant way) with greater specificity. DOE expects that proposals will be at early Technology Readiness Levels (TRLs), ranging from 2 (technology concept and/or application formulated) to 4 (component and/or breadboard validation in laboratory environment).
EERE envisions awarding multiple financial assistance awards in the form of cooperative agreements. The estimated period of performance for each award will be approximately 12-24 months.
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