A Rutgers-led team has developed a new biomass pretreatment process that could make it much cheaper to produce biofuels such as ethanol from plant waste and reduce reliance on fossil fuels. The approach, featuring an ammonia-salt-based solvent that rapidly turns plant fibers into sugars needed to make ethanol, works well... Read more →

The US Department of Energy (DOE) plans to provide up to $75 million over five years for research to develop sustainable bioenergy crops tolerant of environmental stress and resilient to changing environmental conditions. It’s critical for crops grown for bioenergy and bioproducts to be able to survive and thrive under... Read more →

Researchers at the Université de Sherbrooke, Canada, with colleagues at the Université de Toulouse, France, have developed a process for the direct production of levulinates from cheap residual lignocellulosic biomass using an affordable homogeneous catalyst. A paper on their work is published in Fuel. In Canada, the lumbering industry produces... Read more →

The US Department of Energy (DOE), Israel’s Ministry of Energy (MoE) along with the Israel Innovation Authority have selected seven clean energy projects to receive $6.4 million under the Binational Industrial Research and Development (BIRD) Energy program. The total value of the projects is $15.4 million, which includes $9 million... Read more →

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finalized a rule that establishes the required renewable volumes under the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) program for 2020, and the biomass-based diesel volume for 2021. The EPA is committed to ensuring a net of 15 billion gallons of conventional biofuel is blended in 2020.... Read more →

A novel oxygenate molecule that can be produced from biomass shows promise for use as a blend for diesel fuel, according to researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). Their paper is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The NREL scientists, along with colleagues at... Read more →

Biomass technology group BTG plans to set up a new high-tech technology company that can convert crude pyrolysis oil into diesel fuel suitable for the shipping sector. It will be the first refinery in the world for an advanced marine biofuel based on pyrolysis oil. The new facility will be... Read more →

Velocys, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Velocys plc, signed an agreement with Oxy Low Carbon Ventures, LLC (OLCV), to capture CO2 from Velocys’ planned Bayou Fuels biomass-to-fuels project in Natchez, Mississippi, and securely store it underground in a geologic formation. OLCV, a wholly owned subsidiary of Occidental, will take,... Read more →

A new Co-Optimization of Fuels & Engines (Co-Optima) report describes the top ten biofuel-derived blendstock candidates. These top candidates, when blended with petroleum and used in a boosted spark ignition (BSI) engine, will offer environmental benefits and boost energy efficiency all while being available at a competitive price. One of... Read more →

Global Bioenergies will soon be receiving €2.6 million and IBN-One €0.5 million in the form of repayable advances, following last July’s achievement of a technical and financial milestone in the ISOPROD project funded by the French Environment and Energy Management Agency (ADEME), which involves Global Bioenergies, Cristal Union and L’Oréal... Read more →

A team from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) and Idaho National Laboratory has evaluated the process economics and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions for the conversion of 11 biomass feedstocks to produce transportation fuels via fast pyrolysis and then pyrolysis oil upgrading via hydrodeoxygenation. An open-access paper on their work appears... Read more →

The US Department of Energy (DOE), through its Office of Biological and Environmental Research (BER), has launched a major initiative to develop bioenergy crops through genomics-based research. Danforth Center Principal Investigator, Andrea Eveland, Ph.D., will lead a multi-institutional project under this initiative to deepen the understanding of sorghum, a versatile... Read more →

Scientists at the US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) have demonstrated a method to insert genes into a variety of microorganisms that previously would not accept foreign DNA, with the goal of creating custom microbes to break down plants for bioenergy. A new method uses E. coli... Read more →

Gevo, Inc. and Leaf Resources, an Australia-based company and one of the world’s leading companies in converting plant biomass into industrial sugars, have signed a Joint Development Agreement (JDA). The JDA is to explore Gevo’s potential use of cellulosic-derived sugars and glycerol from Leaf and the ability to convert these... Read more →

Clariant has conducted tests on approximately 30 tons of miscanthus provided by INA, Croatia’s leading oil and gas company. The miscanthus biomass was harvested and baled at the INA demonstration site in Croatia in February this year and shipped for processing to Clariant’s pre-commercial sunliquid plant in Straubing, Germany for... Read more →

EPA is granting 31 small refinery RFS exemptions for the 2018 compliance year, as well as 6 denials. The estimated volume of gasoline and diesel exempted is 13,420 million gallons; the estimated renewable volume obligations (RVO) exempted is 1,430 million RINs. The Clean Air Act (CAA) exempted small refineries from... Read more →

Plant cell walls resist chemical or biological degradation, making the breakdown of lignocellulosic biomass into renewable chemical precursors for conversion into chemicals and transportation fuels challenging and costly. As a result, economically viable methods of transforming biomass into biofuels have yet to be realized. In a step forward in understanding... Read more →

Australia-based biotechnology company Circa Group, which produces its bio-based solvent Cyrene from waste cellulose, is participating in a project to develop the first UK industrial scale capability to reclaim and reuse the most valuable components of end-of-life electrical vehicle (EV) batteries. The R2LIB (Reclamation, Remanufacture of Lithium Ion Batteries) project... Read more →

Stora Enso is investing €10 million to build a pilot facility for producing bio-based carbon materials based on lignin. Wood-based carbon can be utilized as a crucial component in batteries typically used in consumer electronics, the automotive industry and large-scale energy storage systems. The pilot plant will be located at... Read more →

In the Netherlands there are now test roads and cycle paths that are paved with a bitumen-like product made from the natural binder lignin. These include a section of road on an industrial site—used daily by cars and heavy trucks, some minor roads, and a cycle path at Wageningen University... Read more →

Three years after embarking upon rigorous evaluation of a pool of more than 400 candidates (earlier post), researchers with the US Department of Energy (DOE) Co-Optimization of Fuels & Engines (Co-Optima) initiative have identified the six blendstocks—di-isobutylene, ethanol, fusel alcohol blend, isobutanol, isopropanol, and n-propanol—that exhibit the greatest potential to... Read more →

A team at S. Korea’s KAIST has engineered an oleaginous bacterium, Rhodococcus opacus, to produce fatty acids (FFAs), fatty acid ethyl esters (FAEEs) and long-chain hydrocarbons (LCHCs). A paper on their work is published in the journal Nature Chemical Biology. Culture conditions were optimized to produce 82.9 g l−1 of triacylglycerols from... Read more →

Researchers at the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics in China report a two-step method for the synthesis of jet-fuel-range high-density polycycloalkanes from polycarbonate waste under mild conditions. An open-access paper on their work appears in the RSC journal Green Chemistry. Plastics are a family of organic polymers which are widely... Read more →

Lubricants—a more than $146-billion market serving numerous applications, automotive among them—are produced from base oils derived from petroleum mineral oils (mineral base oil) or synthetic oils such as poly-α-olefins (PAOs) (synthetic base oil). As such, lubricants have a significant environmental footprint. A team at the University of Delaware has now... Read more →

The US Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory recently released an updated version of an online computer model meant to help bioenergy developers preserve critical resources. The model, called Water Analysis Tool for Energy Resources or WATER, has users from more than 35 US states. This map depicts water availability... Read more →

Anellotech’s Bio-TCat technology has achieved commercially-targeted yields in its TCat-8 pilot unit in Silsbee, Texas during six months of continuous process operations. Anellotech’s core technology, Thermal Catalytic Biomass Conversion (Bio-TCat) was developed to produce chemicals and fuels from renewable, non-food biomass. Based on scientific research initially performed in Professor George... Read more →

The US Department of Energy (DOE) announced more than $79 million in funding for bioenergy research and development including biofuels, bioproducts, and biopower (DE-FOA-00002029). The FOA topics will advance DOE’s Bioenergy Technology Office’s (BETO) objectives to reduce the price of drop-in biofuels, lower the cost of biopower, and enable high-value... Read more →

Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) scientists have developed a sustainable way to demonstrate a new genetic modification that can increase the yield of natural oil in seeds by up to 15% in laboratory conditions. The new method can be applied to crops such as canola, soybean and sunflower, which... Read more →

Researchers at the University of Oklahoma, in collaboration with the University of Tulsa, have a novel approach for the water-assisted upgrading of the renewable chemical furfural, doubling or tripling the rate of conversion. Compared to the vapor phase, liquid-phase heterogeneous catalysis provides additional degrees of freedom for reaction engineering, but... Read more →

A group of Dutch multinationals—FrieslandCampina, Heineken, Philips, DSM, Shell and Unilever—all members of the Dutch Sustainable Growth Coalition (DSGC), will partner with A.P. Moller - Maersk to take a tangible step towards the decarbonization of ocean shipping. A pilot project will test the use of up to 20% sustainable second-generation... Read more →

A team at RWTH Aachen University has developed a novel route for the efficient production of BTX (aromatic hydrocarbons such as benzene, toluene, ethyl benzene and three xylene isomers)—which play an essential role in the petrochemical and fine chemical industries—from bio-derived isobutyraldehyde. In a paper in the RSC journal Green... Read more →

The federal Biomass Research and Development (BR&D) Board unveiled a multi-agency strategy to accelerate innovative technologies that harness the nation’s biomass resources for affordable biofuels, bioproducts, and biopower. The Bioeconomy Initiative: Implementation Framework was developed by the B&RD Board—an interagency collaborative which is co-chaired by the US Department of Agriculture... Read more →

In Australia, QUT researchers and Mercurius Australia are partnering on a pilot plant to prove the economic viability of turning sugarcane waste into either jet and diesel fuel or chemicals that could be used to make plastic soft drink and beer bottles. Dr. Darryn Rackemann, Senior Research Fellow from QUT’s... Read more →

GTI has released a site-specific engineering design titled “Low-Carbon Renewable Natural Gas (RNG) from Wood Wastes”. GTI led a team of engineers and scientists to produce a blueprint for converting an existing biomass facility into an RNG production site, using the wood waste feedstock and some of the existing infrastructure.... Read more →

Global Bioenergies reported that runs using wheat straw hydrolysate provided by its partner Clariant were successfully performed in its Leuna demo plant, leading to the production of cellulosic isobutene for the first time at this scale. These runs were part of OPTISOCHEM (OPTimized conversion of residual wheat straw to bio-ISObutene... Read more →

Gevo, Inc. has developed a proprietary catalytic process that transforms low-cost commercially available, or even waste by-product, renewable alcohols into renewable isoprene that would be expected to compete head-to-head on price with natural and petroleum-based chemical equivalents while reducing CO2 emissions. Isoprene is predominantly used in the production of synthetic-based... Read more →

Pertamina and Eni signed a Memorandum of Understanding to investigates synergies of their respective technologies, expertises and know-how, for jointly evaluating new collaboration opportunities in the areas of circular economy, driver for strategic development for Eni and its subsidiaries Syndial (Environment) and Versalis (Chemicals). The parties are willing to discuss... Read more →

ExxonMobil and Renewable Energy Group (REG) signed a joint research agreement with Clariant to evaluate the potential use of cellulosic sugars from sources such as agricultural waste and residues to produce biofuel. The new partnership expands a previously announced agreement for joint research between ExxonMobil and REG, in which the... Read more →

The US Department of Energy (DOE) has awarded a three-year, $1 million grant to a team of researchers led by a UMass Lowell mechanical engineering professor that is working to develop renewable fuel additives from sawdust and other wood byproducts. The project is part of the Department of Energy’s Co-Optima... Read more →

The US Department of Energy (DOE) Bioenergy Technologies Office (BETO) and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have developed a novel process that uses biomass gasification to produce high-octane gasoline blendstock. The resulting blendstock is low in aromatic compounds. To make this new blendstock, NREL’s indirect liquefaction team first converts... Read more →

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finalized a rule that establishes the required renewable fuel volumes under the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) program for 2019, and biomass-based diesel for 2020. The key elements of the action are: “Conventional” renewable fuel volumes, primarily met by corn ethanol, will be maintained at... Read more →

Global Bioenergies has received 13 letters of intent from French and international industrial leaders for purchases totaling 49,000 to 64,000 tons of isobutene and derivatives annually. This covers the total production capacity of the planned IBN-One plant, a joint venture with Cristal Union, the fourth-largest sugar producer in Europe. The... Read more →

BASF has introduced a product for the production of methanol on the basis of renewable raw materials according to the biomass balance approach. The product name is EU-REDcert-methanol. The company replaces fossil raw materials with second-generation renewable raw materials and uses waste as well as residual materials. As a result,... Read more →

Sustainable technology company Anellotech confirmed significant progress in its Bio-TCat technology development program and has begun planning for scale-up design and engineering of a commercial plant with its process development and design partner IFPEN and commercialization, engineering, and licensing partner Axens. Anellotech has developed an innovative manufacturing process to produce... Read more →

Researchers from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) have successfully produced renewable methane from a biomass-based synthesis gas mixture in their pilot plant for methanation using a new honeycomb catalyst. The quality of this synthetic natural gas (SNG) is comparable to that of fossil natural gas and can be used... Read more →

BP and Johnson Matthey (JM) have signed an agreement with Fulcrum BioEnergy to license their Fischer Tropsch (FT) technology to support Fulcrum’s drive to convert municipal solid waste into biojet fuel. BP and JM have developed a simple-to-operate and cost-advantaged FT technology that can operate both at large and small... Read more →

Researchers at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) have developed a method that can significantly increase the yield of sugars from plants, improving the production of renewable fuels, chemicals, and materials. Producing fuels and chemicals from biomass (wood, grasses, etc.) involves breaking down (deconstructing), plants to produce single carbohydrates, mostly... Read more →

Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, have identified two main challenges for renewable biofuel production from cheap sources: lowering the cost of developing microbial cell factories; and establishing more efficient methods for hydrolysis of biomass to sugars for fermentation. In a paper published in the journal Nature Energy, the... Read more →

Waste-to-biofuels and chemicals producer Enerkem has successfully produced a clean, renewable bio-dimethyl ether (Bio-DME), a by-product of biomethanol, that could replace the use of diesel fuel in the transportation sector. Using the company’s proprietary thermochemical technology, its innovation group has tested and validated the production of fuel-grade bio-DME made from... Read more →

The US Department of Energy (DOE) has selected 36 projects for a total of $80 million in funding to support early-stage bioenergy research and development (R&D). This R&D will enable cost-competitive, drop-in renewable hydrocarbon fuels, bio-based products, and power from non-food biomass and waste feedstocks. The selections stem from four... Read more →