The genes help to better develop the wood part of the grass, called the fibrous, such as what is in rice and wheat. In understanding how these genes operate, the scientists hope to be able to discover how to breed crops so that they need less energy to turn them into biofuels.  READ MORE

The project, which is projected to cost 2 million euros, is 50 percent funded by the Fund for Support to Innovation of the Energy Agency (Adene).

…The project will research areas including improving plant varieties, harvesting, oil extraction and use of sub-products.

Galp Energia’s jatropha plantations in Mozambique are increasing in size and by 2016 the company expects to have a planted area of 23,000 hectares and production of 30,000 tons of oil.  READ MORE

…Since first installing its trademarked Grower Harvester bioreactors at the Shenandoah plant in 2009, the project has continually met or exceeded its expectations, with the latest expansion being no exception. The company announced last fall that it planned to construct the five-acre farm in the spring and is now moving ahead as scheduled. But the successful scaling-up process has brought with it unexpected challenges on the demand side.

Last year, Green Plains CEO Todd Becker said that the project was progressing faster than market opportunities were being developed for algae. As a result, the company began participating in market development activities, supplying algae for feed trials and tests for other markets, such as pharmaceutical applications.

…(T)he company wants to play the role of farmer, supplying the wholesale dried algae to companies for their individual purposes. READ MORE

…As CEO of BioVantage Resources, Inc., Sue is responsible for corporate vision, strategy, execution and capitalization of a company pursuing two tracks of development in the algae industry, one as a scale-up specialist, enabling cultivators to advance from lab level to commercial production. And two, being experts in water reclamation, in which they use their own products to facilitate algae nutrient removal and biomass development.

…We chose the scale-up part of the growing system, and water reclamation. There is always that classic build or buy decision, in early-stage businesses especially. We’ve put together a very nice packaged set of products to allow you to grow algae from milligram, to kilogram, to commercial scale in a 21st Century way.

I’ve got some background in manufacturing, and we’ve commercialized a lot of product. So we’ve looked at how to tackle commercialization of systems so that we can really have repeatable and reliable processes. And that is something we’re good at. Anyone who wants to grow algae at volume needs to go through the scale-up process, so we look at that as our biomass business. We’ve built dozens of scale-up systems already, with customers using it for biofuels, biochemicals, for protein, and we’ve just started dialogs about growing for nutraceuticals and cosmeceuticals.  READ MORE

Mexicali Valley, Mexico and Los Angeles, CA February 3, 2012 – Algae producer Aquaviridis and OriginOil, Inc., the developer of a breakthrough technology to extract oil from algae and an emerging leader in the global algae oil services industry, today announced that Aquaviridis has signed a commercial agreement with OriginOil to help develop the multi-phase algae production rollout at its Mexicali, Mexico site, a potential model for algae sites throughout the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) region, with a focus on desert areas of the American Southwest and Mexico.

OriginOil will provide its expertise to help develop growth and harvesting solutions and implement appropriate OriginOil technologies. The facility will also serve as a test bed for OriginOil innovations.

In announcing the agreement, Aquaviridis president Thomas Byrne stated, “After evaluating OriginOil’s portfolio, our technical team felt that OriginOil had some novel, scalable, and potentially game-changing technologies for algae harvesting and growth enhancement. We are excited about the opportunity to work closely with them as a partner during our research and planning stage. Having the right partners and technologies is critical, as our expectation is to have this facility in revenue this year.”

Aquaviridis is backed by private sector funding, with plans to immediately scale up from research and development to ten acres of pilot algae production by the middle of this year. Commercial scale production capacity is expected by the second quarter of 2013.  Aquaviridis selected the Mexicali Valley as a strategic location due to favorable growing conditions, strong local and governmental support, and available sources of carbon dioxide.

OriginOil’s vice president of marketing, Ken Reynolds added, “The Mexicali Valley is a great place to develop an algae industry, given its climate and access to industry research and resources throughout North America. With the U.S. as a neighboring market for high value exports, Mexico is in an excellent position to take the lead in areas such as research and production of algae for nutritional products, animal feed, and oil for biofuels, which would create long-term regional economic growth and job production.”  READ MORE

“This project truly is a public-private partnership with the Green Vision Group of Fargo and Heartland Renewable Energy of Muscatine, Iowa, plus research by North Dakota State University, to develop the energy beet biofuels industry in North Dakota,” says Cole Gustafson, NDSU Department of Agribusiness and Applied Economics chair.

The NDSU Department of Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering and the Carrington (N.D.) Research Extension Center will continue to provide research for the project.

The $1 million phase II project includes $500,000 in funds from the North Dakota Renewable Energy Council, with approval from the North Dakota Industrial Commission, plus cash-match funds from industry partners Betaseed and Syngenta, and other in-kind contributions.

The project seeks to establish a U.S. Department of Agriculture Risk Management Agency multiperil crop insurance program for energy beets; engineer and evaluate new front-end energy beet processing methods; expand regional energy beet research trials; scale up whole energy beet and juice storage technology to enable year-round processing; and inform producers, community developers and the biofuel industry of the emerging opportunity.

“We envision developing at least 12 sustainable ethanol facilities across North Dakota,” says Maynard Helgaas, president of GVG. “Each plant will use energy beets grown within a 20-mile radius and support job creation in rural communities. This grant will help us make significant progress toward that vision and help develop North Dakota’s energy beet biofuel industry.” GVG is in the process of selecting the location for its first processing facility, which is expected to produce 20 million gallons of ethanol per year once complete.

Yield trials

The first phase of the energy beet project focused on research, including yield trials, storage research and commercially testing the use of a coproduct to provide processing heat. Current yield trials are in the North Dakota communities of Dazey/Hannaford, Turtle Lake, Langdon, Minot, Williston, Carrington and Oakes. In 2012, trial plots will be expanded to include Jamestown, Harvey, Litchville and Colgate. The yield trials will continue to be sponsored by Betaseed and Syngenta.

The plot trial research results in phase 1 exceeded expectations, according to Blaine Schatz, Carrington REC director.

“So far, our research shows that energy beets can be grown successfully outside of the Red River Valley in a variety of soil types and conditions,” Schatz says. “The beets actually help growers improve soil health and give them greater farm income.”

“Ethanol produced from energy beets can be sold at a premium,” Gustafson says. “We expect that energy beet ethanol will produce 50 to 60 percent less greenhouse gas emissions than petroleum-based fuels, which will designate it as an advanced biofuel. We are working to finalize the life-cycle analysis of energy beets through a formal Environmental Protection Agency application. Securing EPA approval of energy beets as an advanced biofuel will mean a significant premium for producers and processors in the sugar-based ethanol market.”

The life-cycle analysis research is funded in part by a separate grant from the North Dakota Agricultural Products Utilization Commission and community donations.

“North Dakota farmers, processors and rural communities should see positive financial returns by growing and processing energy beets for biofuel,” Gustafson says.  READ MORE

…“Almost all of the work performed to date has focused on the carbon effects,” said Matei Georgescu, a climate modeler working in ASU’s Center for Environmental Fluid Dynamics. “We’ve tried to expand our perspective to look at a more complete picture. What we’ve shown is that it’s not all about greenhouse gases, and that modifying the landscape can be just as important.”

…In their study, the researchers simulated an entire growing season with a state-of-the-art regional climate model. They ran two sets of experiments – one with an annual crop representation over the central United States and one with an extended growing season to represent perennial grasses. In the model, the perennial plants pumped more water from the soil to the atmosphere, leading to large local cooling.

“We’ve shown that planting perennial bioenergy crops can lower surface temperatures by about a degree Celsius locally, averaged over the entire growing season,” Lobell said. “That’s a pretty big effect, enough to dominate any effects of carbon savings on the regional climate.”  READ MORE  Abstract

Pollack’s answer is in his theory that water molecular levels (near the surface of water) are not limited to one to two solid levels as the common belief holds, but rather water is layered in some 2 to 3 million strata and water is not merely ordered by two to three tightly bound surface-level layers and a bunch of random molecules floating in the rest of the body of water.

…Biomat has applied this theory to its work in developing shipping container-based algae growth systems.  READ MORE

Carbon: Biogenic vs. Geologic   The study “Managing Forests Because Carbon Matters: Integrating Energy, Products, and Land Management Policy” is an update to a previously released report initiated by the Society of American Foresters, and was put together by a task force of people who had all been involved in forest and carbon accounting aspects.  It took about 10 months to complete, according to lead author Robert Malmsheimer, professor at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry.

…  “As long as you manage forests sustainably, you can produce bioenergy and help address some of the issues surrounding climate change,” Malmsheimer says, segueing into the first supporting conclusion. “We can provide carbon benefits through both storage in forests and through substitution benefits, while providing all of the other benefits that forests normally provide society.”

…The second main supporting conclusion of the study is that energy produced from forest biomass returns to the atmosphere carbon that plants absorbed in the relatively recent past, and therefore it essentially results in no net release of carbon.

…Malmsheimer says the Manomet study had a very specific purpose and a very specific question, which was answered. “The problem with that study is that the question was wrong: what is the carbon accounting on a single plot of land? We don’t manage just one plot; we manage hundreds of thousands of stands. Granted, some stands are just getting to a point of carbon deficit, and some are further away, but you have to look at multiple stands over long periods of time. It’s impossible for [wood energy] to be worse than coal, because you have to go back to the very basic idea that with coal you’re taking geologic carbon and putting it into the atmosphere.”  READ MORE and MORE and MORE (Environmental and Energy Study Institute)

The genes help to better develop the wood part of the grass, called the fibrous, such as what is in rice and wheat. In understanding how these genes operate, the scientists hope to be able to discover how to breed crops so that they need less energy to turn them into biofuels.

Most of the energy in the plants is stored in the woody part but it is difficult to access this energy. However, the researchers discovered that they could create multi-use crops where the straw could be used to create energy more efficiently.

… ‘What we hope to do with this research is to produce varieties of plants where the woody parts yield their energy much more readily – but without compromising the structure of the plant. We think that one way to do this might be to modify the genes that are involved in the formation of a molecule called xylan – a crucial structural component of plants.’  READ MORE