Department of Energy Announces $97 Million for Bioenergy Research and Development

Energy (DOE)Federal Agency/Executive Branch

July 31, 2020

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(U.S. Department of Energy) Today, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced more than $97 million in funding for 33 projects that will support high-impact technology research and development to accelerate the bioeconomy. These projects will improve the performance and lower the cost and risk of technologies that can be used to produce biofuels, biopower, and bioproducts from biomass and waste resources.

“Advancements made in bioenergy technologies will help expand America’s energy supply, grow our economy, and enhance our energy security,” said Under Secretary of Energy Mark W. Menezes. “These projects will ensure the United States’ leadership across all segments of the growing global bioeconomy, and allow us to provide U.S. consumers and businesses more homegrown energy choices for their fuels and products.”

The selected projects will address a variety of research and development areas, including:

Scale-up of bench applications to reduce scale-up risks for biofuel and bioproduct processes;
Waste to energy strategies including strategies for municipal solid waste, wet wastes, like food and manures, and municipal waste water treatment;
Cost reduction of algal biofuels by improving carbon efficiency and by employing direct air capture technologies;
Quantification of the economic and environmental benefits associated with growing energy crops, focusing on restoring water quality and soil health;
Development and testing of low-emission, high-efficiency residential wood heaters;
Innovative technologies to manage major forms of urban and suburban waste, with a focus on using plastic waste to make recycled products and using wastes to produce low-cost biopower; and
Scalable CO₂ electrocatalysis technologies.

More information about how DOE is working to develop industrially relevant, transformative, and revolutionary bioenergy technologies can be found on EERE’s Bioenergy Technologies Office website. READ MORE

SELECTEE	LOCATION (CITY, STATE)	PROJECT TITLE	DOE SHARE
Topic 1: Scale-Up of Bench Applications
University of Alabama	Tuscaloosa, AL	Innovation and optimization of the Szego Mill for reliable, efficient, and successful up-scaling of the deacetylation and mechanical refining process for biofuel production	$3,053,043
University of North Dakota	Grand Forks, ND	Scale-Up of the Primary Conversion Reactor to Generate a Lignin-Derived Cyclohexane Jet Fuel	$3,745,000
Earth Energy Renewables, LLC	Bryan, TX	Scale-up and Qualification of Net-Zero Sustainable Aviation Fuels from Wet Waste	$4,000,000
Global Algae Innovations	San Diego, CA	Scale-up of Novel Algae Drying and Extraction Unit Operations	$4,000,000
North Carolina State University	Raleigh, NC	Scaling Up Biocrude Derived Anode Material (BDAM)	$3,999,938
Oregon State University	Corvallis, OR	Microchannel Reactor for Ethanol to n-Butene Conversion	$4,000,000
Research Triangle Institute	Research Triangle Park, NC	Integrated Separations to Improve Biocrude Recovery for Biofuels and Bioproducts	$3,690,002
Georgia Institute of Technology	Atlanta, GA	Conversion of 2,3-Butanediol to Biojet Fuel: Scale-up and Technoeconomic Analysis of Energy-Efficient Separations and Fermentative Diol Production	$3,001,359
Topic 2: Waste to Energy Strategies for the Bioeconomy
AMP Robotics	Louisville, CO	Artificial Neural Network for MSW Characterization	$1,886,922
Gas Technology Institute	Woodland Hills, CA	Decontamination of Non-recyclable MSW and Preprocessing for Conversion to Diesel	$2,500,000
UHV Technologies	Lexington, KY	Advanced Sensing for Characterization and Sorting of Non-Recyclable Plastics Using Sensor Fusion with Artificial Intelligence	$2,500,000
University of Cincinnati	Cincinnati, OH	High Precision Sorting, Fractionation, and Formulation of Municipal Solid Waste for Biochemical Conversion	$2,089,767
University of Maryland - College Park	College Park, MD	Innovative Polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHA) Production with Microbial Electrochemical Technology (MET) Incorporation for Community-Scale Waste Valorization	$1,985,230
Princeton University	Princeton, NJ	Synergistic Thermo-Microbial-Electrochemical (T-MEC) Approach for Drop-In Fuel Production from Wet Waste	$2,500,000
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign	Champaign, IL	Process Optimization and Real-Time Control for Synergistic Microalgae Cultivation and Wastewater Treatment	$2,000,000
Utah State University	Logan UT	Synergistic Municipal Wastewater Treatment Using a Rotating Algae Biofilm Reactor	$1,877,735
Topic 3: Algae Bioproducts and CO2 Direct-Air-Capture Efficiency
Global Algae Innovations	San Diego, CA	Production of Algae Biofuel and Bioproducts with CO2 Direct Air Capture	$2,000,000
Montana State University	Bozeman, MT	Transforming High pH/High Alkalinity Cultivation through Beneficial Microbiomes and Improved Pond Design	$2,000,000
Arizona State University	Tempe, AZ	ASU’s Polymer-enhanced Cyanobacterial Bioproductivity (AUDACity)	$1,999,051
University of California - San Diego	La Jolla, CA	Biomolecular Films for Direct Air Capture of CO2	$2,000,000
MicroBio Engineering, Inc.	San Luis Obispo, CA	Microalgae Commodities Production with a Direct Air Capture Process	$1,999,882
Lumen Bioscience, Incorporated	Seattle, WA	Alkaline Carbon Capture and Expression-Streamlined Spirulina Cultivated in Air for Reliable Bioproducts, Oil, and Nutrition	$2,000,000
Duke University	Beaufort, NC	Development of High Value Bioproducts and Enhancement of Direct-Air-Capture Efficiency with a Marine Algae Biofuel Production System	$1,967,473
Topic 4: Bio-Restore: Biomass to Restore Natural Resources
University of Nebraska - Lincoln	Lincoln, NE	EXCHANGE: Expanding the Conversion of Habitat in the Northern Great Plains Ecosystem	$3,200,000
Mississippi State University	Mississippi State, MS	PoSIES: Populus in the Southeast for Integrated Ecosystem Services	$2,035,602
University of Florida	Gainesville, FL	Evaluation of Energycane for Bioenergy and Sustainable Agricultural Systems (EC-BioSALTS)	$3,992,520
Topic 5: Efficient Wood Heaters
NTRE Tech LLC	North Canton, OH	Advanced Low-Emission Residential Fluid-Bed Biomass Combustor	$2,431,050
Ohio State University	Columbus, OH	Simulation-Driven Design Optimization and Automation for Cordwood-Fueled Room Heaters	$2,500,000
Topic 6: Biopower and Products from Urban and Suburban Wastes: North American Multi-University Partnership for Research and Education
University of Michigan	Ann Arbor, MI	Integrated biochemical and electrochemical technologies (IBET) to convert organic waste to biopower via North American research and educational partnerships	$5,000,000
University of Wisconsin at Madison	Madison, WI	Multi-University Center on Chemical Upcycling of Waste Plastics (CUWP)	$10,000,000
Topic 7: Scalable CO2 Electrocatalysis
Dioxide Materials	Boca Raton, FL	Electrolyzers For CO2 Conversion from BioSources	$2,500,000
University of Delaware	Newark, DE	Electrochemical Production of Formic Acid from Carbon Dioxide in Solid Electrolytes	$2,497,686
Opus 12	Berkeley, CA	PEM CO2 Electrolyzer Scaleup to enable MW-Scale Electrochemical Modules	$2,500,000

Official notices can be found at EERE Exchange or Grants.gov. To view all current solicitations for the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), see the EERE Funding Opportunities page. This list is for information only—it may not be inclusive of all solicitations. Funding amounts and schedule dates are subject to change. READ MORE

A Whopping $97M from U.S. Department of Energy for Bioenergy Research and Development (Biofuels Digest)

Excerpt from Biofuels Digest: Biojet fuel from Municipal Solid Waste

While most of the projects getting funding are university-led projects, there were a few going to companies like Texas-based Earth Energy Renewables whose technology originated from the effort of Dr. Mark Holtzapple at Texas A&M University. The technology underwent successful scale up from laboratory to demonstration scale, being able to process over 3 dry ton/day of Municipal Solid Waste at the company’s demonstration site in Bryan, TX. Earth Energy continues the development and commercial deployment of this technology focusing in the near term on chemicals such as organic acids and esters, and, as the company grows and the technology is scaled up, on drop-in biofuels such as gasoline, jet fuel and diesel.

This DOE funded project by Earth Energy Renewables is focused on enabling the world’s first demonstration flight on sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) produced from wet waste that reduces GHG emissions by over 100% compared to fossil jet and involves VFA catalytic conversion by NREL, industrial SAF refinery knowledge by World Energy (formerly AltAir), catalytic process technology scale-up by MATRIC, ASTM jet fuel testing and approval expertise by the University of Dayton Research Institute (UDRI) and FAA, and jet fuel supply chain knowledge and flight demonstration capabilities by Southwest Airlines and Boeing.

Getting Green with Algae Production

Another company getting some of the DOE funding is California-based Global Algae Innovations which designs innovative technology to make algae production more efficient and consistent. Their project will scale the two most important and high risk remaining novel unit operations, drying and extraction, to engineering scale to reduce the uncertainty and risk of an integrated biorefinery producing algae biofuels and co-products. The objectives are scale the processes to achieve 500 to 1000 hours of cumulative time on-stream, 100 to 250 hours of continuous time on-stream, and a throughput equivalent of 12,500 to 25,000 gallons of lipid intermediate per year with a projected minimum fuel selling price of $2.50 to $3.00 per gallon of gasoline equivalent (GGE) and a 90% reduction in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions relative to petroleum-derived fuels.

MicroBio Engineering is another interesting company based in California that focuses in the design and construction of algae ponds for wastewater reclamation, biofuel production, microalgae feeds and specialty products. Their project involved 3 major participants: Cyanotech, Corp, Kailua-Kona, HI, (Cyanotech), Global Thermostat LLC (GT), Brighton, CO, and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), Sequim, WA.

That project is focused on the utilization of CO2 from air to cultivate microalgae and produce biomass for higher value nutritional products in the near-term and commodities, including feeds, biofertilizers, bioplastics and fuels, in the longer-term. The two approaches to accomplish this objective are:

The direct air-CO2 capture (DAC) by a physical-chemical process provided by Global Thermostat (GT), that delivers a near 100% concentrated CO2 stream to the algal cultures. The GT-DAC process could become commercial at the Cyanotech facility in the near-term.
The use of the algal cultures and cultivation systems themselves to provide CO2 absorption from air at a rate supporting algal biomass production approaching that with high CO2 sources. READ MORE

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Aviation Fuel/Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) grants Department of Energy (DOE) bioeconomy scale up bioproducts Waste-to-Energy MSW (Municipal Solid Waste) food waste manure water treatment wastewater algae direct air capture energy crops water quality soi soil health waste management plastic recycled plastics electrocatalysis Alabama lignin Jetfuel (Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF)) North Dakota Texas California North Carolina Biocrude/Green Crude/SynCrude ethanol/bioethanol Oregon Georgia Colorado Ohio Maryland New Jersey Illinois Utah Montana Arizona carbon capture and storage (CCS) carbon capture and utilization (CCU) Washington energy cane Nebraska Mississippi Florida Wisconsin Michigan Delaware

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