Advanced BioFuels USA

by Tammy Klein (Transport Energy Strategies)  Thanks to all of you who attended the recent webinar with Dr. David Babson, Program Director, Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (ARPA-E).  The title of his talk was “Changing what’s possible for a sustainable future,” which included a topic that is top of mind for many involved in the fuels arena — reaching net negative fuels and incentivizing carbon optimization. Following are a few highlights from the discussion.

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This is to highlight the fact that one of the largest industries on the face of the earth by 2100 is going to be carbon removal and management. And therefore, from the Department of Energy standpoint, we are very interested in ensuring that the technologies that service this future are very large, perhaps the largest industry on the face of the earth, are serviced with technologies that are both low cost and energy efficient.

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On Transforming the Value Chain and What That Means for Fuels:

“We are creating the opportunity space to not only provide lower carbon fuels and chemicals and products and materials for the economy is important, but also providing standalone negative emissions technologies are going to be critical for achieving both robust markets that are efficiently incentivizing sustainability, and also in achieving ambitious climate targets for the lowest cost per unit carbon.

Now, with respect to this new carbon economy, this bioeconomy, ARPA-E is seeking to transform the value chain. And we recognize that the best way to ensure that we can produce and synthesize fuels and chemicals and products that are not just lower carbon, but carbon negative, is that we need to take a supply chain approach and actually implement new technologies up and down the bioeconomy supply chain. And we have done that.” 

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On What This All Could Mean for the Future of Refining:

“Another area that I’m looking at is what the future of refining looks like. How do we design systems that can accommodate more heterogeneous and dynamic feedstocks, while simultaneously producing necessary products and accommodating external reducing equivalents, or even generating power and providing CCS. And the vision for this is that we really need to rethink biorefining.

One of the natural types of conversion processes that we’re looking at as a means to identify engineered approaches is anaerobic digestion.

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But we could actually begin thinking about how we can combine farm feedstocks and waste residues and those sorts of things in a truly circular economy to reimagine the refining industry. So imagine transitioning from even optimized anaerobic digesters to a biorefinery that is built on anaerobic, thermodynamically-driven processes, but provides way more services and products than just biogas.  READ MORE