By Renewable Energy Focus staff

The projects will advance the technology improvements and process integration needed to produce drop-in biofuels and other bio-based chemicals.

The projects aim to improve the economics and efficiency of biological and chemical processes that convert non-food biomass feedstocks into replacements for petroleum-based feedstocks, products, and fuels.

The Biofuel Projects:

1. General Atomics (up to US$2m, San Diego, CA) – aims to reduce energy, capital, and operational cost for algal fermentation processes. This will increase production of algal oils, which can be further refined into advanced biofuels;
2. Genomatica, Inc. (up to US$5m, San Diego, CA) – will deliver an engineered organism and optimized fermentation process to enable the conversion of cellulosic sugars to 1.4-butanediol (BDO). Such technology will enhance the commercial profitability of integrated biorefineries by enabling co-production of high-volume fuels and the higher-margin commodity chemical, BDO;
3. Michigan Biotechnology Institute (up to US$4.3m, Lansing, MI) –will focus on improvements to a pretreatment process, which provides a stable, conversion-ready intermediate of consistent quality at a cost and in a format compatible with long-term storage and ease of transfer between multiple modes of transportation;
4. HCL CleanTech, Inc. (up to US$9m, Oxford, NC) – will develop and demonstrate process improvements for pretreatment, conversion to sugars, and subsequent conversion of those sugars to fuels. The complete integrated process will use concentrated hydrochloric acid hydrolysis to convert pre-extracted biomass feedstocks including wood waste into fermentable sugars, and then further convert the sugars into diesel products;
5. Texas Engineering Experiment Station (up to US$2.3m, College Station, TX) – focus on developing a pretreatment for cellulosic biomass feedstocks using a combination of chemical and mechanical processing. Once the cellulosic feedstock has been pretreated it can be converted into biofuels, including hydrocarbons; and
6. Virent (up to US$13.4m, Madison, WI) – aims to develop a fully integrated process that can efficiently and cost effectively convert a cellulosic biomass feedstock, such as corn stover, to a mix of hydrocarbons ideally suited for blending into jet fuel.