Heard on the Floor at ABLC Next

November 01, 2019

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by Jim Lane (Biofuels Digest) USDA releases Report on the Bioeconomy: The USDA released its Report on the Bioeconomy Imiplementation Framework. The Bioeconomy Initiative: Implementation Framework will serve as a guiding document for the BR&D Board member agencies to increase government accountability and efficiency, maximize interagency coordination on bioeconomy research and other activities, and accelerate innovative and sustainable technologies that harness the nation’s biomass resources. The cutting-edge research and development (R&D) described in this Framework can advance technologies to provide a secure, reliable, affordable, and enduring supply of U.S. energy and products.

DOE: It’s LanzaTech!

Also on the ABLC floor, the US Departmenbt of Energy announced LanzaTech as the official downselectee for a long-standing project in the Pilot- and Demonstration-Scale Manufacturing of Biofuels, Bioproducts, and Biopower.”

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Genomatica: Asia goes BiG

Opening speaker this week was Christophe Schilling,who announced Genomatica’s multi-year agreement with Daicel Corporation to be the exclusive distributor of its award-winning Brontide butylene glycol in the Asia-Pacific region.

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Sustainable Aviation Fuels

Today, a new study on pathways towards sustainable production of aviation fuel was released. Nordic GTL – a pre-feasibility study on sustainable aviation fuel from biogas, hydrogen, and CO2.

The purpose of this pre-feasibility study was to identify technological pathways and processes for producing sustainable aviation fuel based on renewable feedstocks of biogas, bio-methane, electro-methane, hydrogen and CO2 and to make a preliminary assessment of their feasibility including their economic/commercial viability. The ability to integrate methane, CO2, electricity, and hydrogen in one supply chain is a key feature of this pathway. By using flue gas CO2 and atmospheric CO2 as feedstocks, it makes the pathway a sustainable and scalable solution. Since this process is based on biogas and CO2, the jet fuels will be close to CO2 neutral.

A benefit of the proposed pathway is that it builds on a backbone of existing large-scale technology, i.e. the so-called gas-to-liquid or GTL technology where liquid fuels are produced from methane via synthesis gas. Synthesis gas, or syngas, is a mix of hydrogen and carbon monoxide, being an intermediate in the conversion of methane to liquid fuels. Several such large-scale GTL plants are in operation across the world converting natural gas into liquid fuels. The same technology can be applied to bio-methane and green syngas, and more on the story is here.

CO2-to-everything

News filtered up from Palo Alto on CO2 to fuels: a novel approach from Stanford University engineers yields four times more ethane, propane and butane than existing methods for using carbon dioxide from car exhaust pipes and other sources and converting into fuels like natural gas or propane:

Although the process is still just a lab-based prototype, the researchers expect it could be expanded enough to produce useable amounts of fuel. Much work remains, however, before average consumer will be able to purchase products based on such technologies. Next steps include trying to reduce harmful byproducts from these reactions, such as the toxic pollutant carbon monoxide. The group is also developing ways to make other beneficial products, not just fuels. One such product is olefins, which can be used in a number of industrial applications and are the main ingredients for plastics.

“One can imagine a carbon-neutral cycle that produces fuel from carbon dioxide and then burns it, creating new carbon dioxide that then gets turned back into fuel,” said Matteo Cargnello, an assistant professor of chemical engineering at Stanford who led the research, published in Angewandte Chemie.