Renewables Nuked; Nukes Renewed: Bioenergy Slashed 69% as US DOE Budget Gets Detail; The Digest’s 7-Minute Guide to the DOE Budget

by Jim Lane (Biofuels Digest) In Washington, the US Department of Energy submitted a request for a $1.433B cut, or 69.3 percent to the Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy annual budget, and targeted a $168.4M cut in the budget for bioenergy technologies, or 74.3 percent.

EERE is targeted under this budget request for a headcount reduction of 187 full-time employee equivalents, or 32.6 percent below the 2017 Continuing Resolution that the Department is using as its 2017 budget. Program direction is being slated for a $29.15M budget cut, an 18.9% drop..

In the Bioenergy Technologies Office, R&D for Conversion Technologies will be reduced by $50.9M or 59.5%, and Demonstration and Market Transformation has been re-named “Advanced Development & Optimization” and will be cut by $69.1M or 92.0%. Strategic analysis and cross-cutting sustainability will be cut by 54%, and feedstocks support will be reduced by 74 percent to $11M.

n the documents accompanying the budget request, Secretary Rick Perry and the Trump Administration focused the Department on early-stage R&D activities and said that the Department would discontinue support of any bioenergy pilot- or demonstration-scale projects in Fiscal 2018.

The reductions were part of a devastating round of proposed cutbacks, including the wind-down of the early-stage focused Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA-E), and a cessation of funding for the Title 17 Loan Guarantee program ...

We can resist the temptation to wonder why — amidst all the budget slaughter — the Administration is boosting spending for Nuclear Survivability by 84 percent, or $20 million. And the Administration is doubling the budget for tritium sustainability – that’s an isotope of hydrogen critical to maintaining US nuclear weapons (note: tritium decays into helium at a 5.5% rate each year, spending is always a priority to keep enough material around). Plus, $332 million is earmarked for a new program for W88 alteration. W88 is the designation for the standard US nuclear warhead.

Overall, the DOE budget is shifting from 63% defense related to 73% defense-related ...

As the Detailed Budget justification revealed, a sharp shift towards very early-stage R&D is in sight for the Bioenergy Technologies Office:

The Bioenergy Technologies Program focuses on early stage applied research and development (R&D) to strengthen the body of knowledge enabling industry to develop and deploy sustainable bioenergy technologies capable of producing price competitive biofuels from non-food sources of biomass such as wastes and agricultural residues, and from energy crops like switchgrass, and algae. The program’s primary focus is on R&D to produce “drop-in” biofuels that are compatible with existing fueling infrastructure and vehicles across a range of transportation modes, including renewable-gasoline, -diesel, and -jet fuels.

The Agile BioFoundry survives

• The Feedstock Supply and Logistics subprogram will support a consortium of national laboratories and industry experts at the interface between feedstock-conversion-integration, named the Feedstock-Conversion Interface Consortium (FCIC). The consortium is responding to lessons learned in engineering scale up and re-focusing R&D efforts on developing a fundamental understanding of feedstock preprocessing and the molecular deconstruction of polymers within biomass. This highly technical, early-stage R&D will improve downstream conversion efficiency and throughput, and will provide tools for the entire industry to build upon as they develop new markets for biomass.

• The Conversion Technologies subprogram will support transformative R&D in synthetic biology of engineered organisms through the Agile BioFoundry and explore the potential of new novel catalysts through the Chemical Catalysis for Bioenergy (ChemCatBio) consortium to enable industry to improve yields and selectivity of renewable chemicals and drop-in biofuels.

• The Advanced Development and Optimization subprogram will support collaborative R&D with the Vehicle Technologies program on the Co-Optimization of Fuels and Engines (Co-Optima) to develop bio-based fuels/additives with the potential to enable a 15-20% fuel economy gain when blended with petroleum and used in high-efficiency engines.

The Strategic Analysis and Cross-cutting Sustainability subprogram will analyze pathways and R&D strategies capable of achieving an ultimate target of $2 per gallon gasoline-equivalent (gge) and conduct sustainability research to identify and fill knowledge gaps related to increasing bioenergy production without detriment to food security, air, land and water resources.

The BioEnergy Research Centers

They survive in this budget proposal, but in reduced size and with altered scope, and they are slated “to be recompeted”. The budget request is $40M, down from $75M this year.

One big note for universities and other research institutes: R&D is going in-house. BETO proposes that “all funding will support early-stage R&D conducted by the National Laboratories including targeted “CRADA” partnerships.”

Demonstration & Market Transformation. Co-Optimization of Fuels and Engines activities will have reduced emphasis on fuels to enable spark ignition engines, which have nearer term market introduction potential and are better understood by industry. No new integrated biorefinery pilot, demonstration, or pioneer projects will be solicited or awarded. Management of existing projects will continue to completion. READ MORE