The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has announced up to USD $10 million in funding for six projects representing innovative technologies and solutions to advance bioenergy development. These projects, located in Arizona, California, North Carolina, Delaware and Illinois, will support the Bioenergy Technologies Office’s work to develop renewable and cost-competitive biofuels from non-food biomass feedstocks by reducing the technical risk associated with potentially breakthrough approaches and technologies for investors.
Included in the selected projects is the Duke University Project, in Durham, North Carolina:
This project will enable a dramatic reduction in costs for commercial-scale biorefineries through “dynamic metabolic control.” Using the patent-pending Synthetic Metabolic Valve technology to demonstrate process intensification technology, which allows smaller reactors to be much more productive, the team will develop this process for the production of a fuel precursor. More importantly, this technology could be applied to many other bioprocesses to produce biochemicals and biofuels. If successful, the project will enable a commercial-scale bioprocess (greater than 100 million gallons of fuel per year) with capital costs less than that of a current demonstration plant (less than USD $40 million).