DE-FOA-0002423 FY21 Bioenergy Technologies Office (BETO) Feedstock Technologies and Algae FOA DEADLINE: February 1, 2021

(U.S. Department of Energy) DOE’s Bioenergy Technologies Office (BETO) develops technologies that convert domestic biomass and waste resources into fuels, products, and power to enable affordable energy, economic growth, and innovation in renewable energy and chemicals production. This Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) DE-FOA-0002423 will support BETO’s highest priority research and development (R&D) areas in two BETO programs: Feedstock Technologies and Advanced Algal Systems. Both Topic Areas support BETO’s objectives to reduce the minimum selling price of drop-in biofuels, lower the cost of biopower, and enable high-value products from biomass or waste resources.

Topic Area 1: Characterization of Municipal Solid Waste to Enable Production of Conversion-Ready Feedstocks

Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) represents a potential low-cost, abundant feedstock for producing fuels and products. The heterogeneity of MSW characteristics including chemical composition, and physical and biological properties, presents a significant challenge for utilization. The importance of any particular MSW characteristic is defined by the conversion technology specifications.

Therefore, Subtopic 1a focuses on understanding the variability of MSW characteristics that are critical to specific conversion technologies, to inform the steps necessary to produce conversion-ready feedstocks. Characterization includes measurement of: multiple features (chemical, physical, and biological), multiple scales (macro, micro, and molecular), multiple speeds (including rapid/real-time measurements on a conveyor), multiple sites, and multiple time periods (seasons, years). Characteristics of interest include but are not limited to: moisture content, particle size/shape metrics, density, inorganic content (including speciation), proximate/ultimate analysis, molecular/chemical composition, rheology, and contamination sources.

Subtopic 1b focuses on developing rapid/real-time measurement techniques for these characteristics. In the near-term, robust, low cost, and rapid analysis technologies will be vital to developing the preprocessing systems necessary to create on-specification feedstock, which is a crucial step needed for commercial deployment by industry. Rapid analysis technology, in conjunction with artificial intelligence, will be an important aspect of any preprocessing system and will allow for increased feedstock quality and reduced costs of feedstock production. On-line systems also allow for process control systems, which can be employed to improve preprocessing performance when there are variances in attributes.

For the purposes of this Topic Area, the relevant feedstock is non-recycled MSW, which would be going to a landfill. Specifically, the focus is the organic portions of MSW that can be converted to biofuels/ bioproducts, including non-recycled paper, plastic, rubber and leather, textiles, wood, food waste, and yard trimming constituents of the MSW stream, and any relevant contaminants that could affect conversion of the feedstock to a fuel or product.

The focus on MSW in this Topic Area is to contribute to BETO’s 2030 cost goal of $2.50/GGE via the introduction of economically-advantaged feedstocks such as MSW. The BETO Multi-Year Program Plan outlines the goals and barriers that must be overcome in each of BETO's technical program areas.⁶ This Topic Area will inform strategies to overcome Feedstock Technologies barriers Ft-G Materials Physical State Alterations, Ft-J Operational Reliability, and Ft-A Feedstock Availability and Cost. These technical barriers cover risk and assumptions for the Feedstock Technologies milestones that occur from FY23 to FY30.

...

Topic Area 2: Algae Productivity Exceeding Expectations (APEX)

Description

Algae are photosynthetic, carbon sequestering organisms that have the ability to grow in fresh to saturated saline water, at a broad range of pH, and in many growth configurations including open unlined ponds, enclosed photobioreactors, attached growth systems, and in the open ocean. Due to their ability to use sunlight to convert carbon dioxide (CO₂) into biomass with advantageous biochemical compositions, at high areal yield, using marginal land, and with waste resources, algae are a desirable renewable feedstock for the production of biofuels and bioproducts. However, increases in productivity per cultivation area (areal productivity) are necessary to accelerate the commercialization of algae technologies.

This Topic Area seeks to support research to develop and test strain and cultivation technologies that advance the state-of-the-art for algal areal productivity, and biomass quality achievable in industrially relevant cultivation systems.

BETO, through the DISCOVR Consortium⁸, executes an annual Algae State of Technology campaign (SOT).⁹ The Algae SOT benchmarks the areal productivity and biomass quality from promising microalgae strains grown outdoors under standard and/or experimental cultivation management practices in replicated miniponds. The Algae SOT encompasses hundreds of days of cultivations to generate seasonal and annual areal productivity averages. These areal productivities and biomass qualities are compared to previous years to assess technology progress and to evaluate challenges towards achieving program goals as outlined in the BETO Multi-Year Plan.¹⁰ The 2020 BETO Algae SOT is 18.4 g/m²/day, which is an average of seasonal productivities acquired from over 353 days of cultivation trials (See 2020 BETO Algae State of Technology and 2030 areal productivity technical projections table). READ MORE

Department of Energy Announces $35 Million for Bioenergy Research and Development (U.S. Department of Energy)