New Grant Will Shift Focus of UW-Madison Alternative Fuel Research Center away from Ethanol

Energy, Federal Agency/Executive Branch, Feedstock, Feedstocks, Field/Orchard/Plantation Crops/Residues, Forestry/Wood/Residues/Waste, Funding/Financing/Investing, grants, Process, R & D Focus, University/College Programs, Wisconsin

July 24, 2017

Print This Article Share it With Friends

by Nico Savidge (University of Wisconsin-Madison) A UW-Madison research center that has used the university’s largest-ever federal grant to develop ethanol technology over the past decade will shift its focus to other alternative fuels after winning another major award from the U.S. Department of Energy.

The Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center will use the five-year grant to learn more about how to sustainably produce energy from switchgrass, poplar trees, sorghum and other dedicated bioenergy crops — those that, unlike ethanol, are not also used for food, director Tim Donohue said Monday.

The center received $267 million over 10 years from the Department of Energy for its ethanol research, which Donohue said will wind down over the next six to 18 months.

UW-Madison Chancellor Rebecca Blank warned last month that spending cuts in the Trump administration’s budget proposal threatened funding for several research initiatives at the university, including the bioenergy center.

Ethanol has been embraced by the energy industry over the years, Donohue said, and putting greater emphasis on research to develop other biofuels fulfills the center’s mission “to generate next-generation technologies.”

…

Researchers will work to develop new fuels from bioenergy crops and to extract chemicals from them that can also be sold, he said. That way, refineries for those crops could function much like traditional ones, which turn crude oil into both fuel and the chemical precursors for products such as nylon. READ MORE

About Author

Scroll Back To Top More Articles From Author

jivancic

Scroll Back To Top

Comments are closed.

Advanced BioFuels USA