May
10
Ionic liquid pretreatments show great potential as a biomass pretreatment for dissolving lignocellulose and helping to hydrolyze the resulting aqueous solution into fuel sugars. But the best of these ionic liquids so far have required the use of expensive enzymes. Blake Simmons, a chemical engineer who heads the Joint BioEnergy Institute’s (JBEI) Deconstruction Division has [...]
Apr
23
Bacteria Make Diesel Fuel On Demand
April 23, 2013 | Leave a Comment
A team from the University of Exeter, with support from Shell, has developed a method to make bacteria produce diesel on demand. Sounding a bit like science fiction the technology still faces many significant commercialization challenges. But the diesel, produced by the special strains of E. coli bacteria, is almost identical to conventional diesel fuel, [...]
Apr
15
A New way to Upgrade Ethanol to Butanol
April 15, 2013 | Leave a Comment
Duncan Wass explained a discovery that could speed an emerging effort to replace ethanol in gasoline with the substantially better biofuel additive called butanol at the 245th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society. In view of some experts regarding butanol as “the gasoline of the future” the report on this discovery holds [...]
Apr
8
Solazyme Makes News for Several Niche Bio Oil Markets
April 8, 2013 | 3 Comments
Walter Rakitsky, Ph.D gave a keynote talk at the 245th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS) yesterday, April 7th. The presentation described technology that accelerates microalgae’s ability to produce many different types of renewable oils for fuels, chemicals, foods and personal-care products within days using standard industrial fermentation. This is not [...]
Apr
2
If You Can’t Beat the Lignin Change It
April 2, 2013 | Leave a Comment
Lignocellulosic Biomass (LB) is the most abundant organic material on Earth. LB could supply the sugars needed to produce advanced biofuels that can supplement or replace fossil fuels. Humans have been using LB as animal feed for thousands of years, and for the past two centuries it’s been the raw material of the paper industry. [...]
Mar
27
Discovery Traps CO2 From the Air to Make Fuel
March 27, 2013 | Leave a Comment
Researchers at the University of Georgia (UG) have found a way to transform the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere into useful industrial products. It’s a development sure to excite the global warming crowd. The dubious idea of excess carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere created by the widespread burning of fossil fuels is said to be [...]
Mar
25
Fruit Trees For Fuel
March 25, 2013 | 1 Comment
Fast growing trees, especially the poplars are being studied as they produce a large body of biomass per area. Poplars and willows are leading candidates as biofuel crops that are expected to produce cellulosic ethanol and higher energy content fuels when the sugars can be efficiently extracted. We non-tree experts are going to be surprised [...]
Mar
22
Ionic liquids are the current leading edge of research to get the tough to get sugars from cellulosic and lignin tissues of plants. News has broken via a prepublication release of a paper from a team at the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI). The JBEI team at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has developed a novel [...]
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