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News and TrendsA new report by International Finance Corporation (IFC) reveals that Egypt's cement producers could save money and lower greenhouse gas emissions by using their waste as a feedstock to power their production facilities. The study found that Egypt produces enough alternative fuels to power the entire cement sector. These sources of alternative fuels include municipal solid waste, agricultural waste, sewage, and old tires. Increased use of these wastes as fuel could help save the cement industry $51 million each year by 2025 and reduce reliance on fossil fuels. However, it also found several obstacles, including the lack of a well-established supply chain that would collect, process, and deliver waste to cement plants. This study is timely since there is currently a nationwide shortage of natural gas, prompting a number of cement producers to turn to coal and petcoke to power their plants. By 2025, the sector is projected to use about 9.7 million tons of coal per year. The city of South Portland, Maine, began a project last October 24 in which selected city vehicles will run on a 20% biodiesel blend (B20) for a full year to test the efficacy of the fuel in all conditions, including during the coldest months. The city has also collaborated with Maine Standard Biofuels (MSB), a community-scale grease collector, biodiesel producer and distributor in Maine, to supply the B20 blend for the project. If successful, South Portland will incorporate biodiesel in the city's entire diesel fleet. MSB collects used cooking oil from restaurants all over New England and South Portland. This project follows the city's Climate Action Plan from 2014, which identified biodiesel use as a way to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, reduce petroleum fuel consumption and move toward non-toxic alternatives. The North Carolina Biotechnology Center recently received a US $1.87 million grant to start a three-year project to study the production of sorghum as biomass for biofuel in the Mid-Atlantic region of the USA. The project is aided by the grant to NCBiotech's Biotechnology Crop Commercialization Center (BCCC). The grant was the largest of seven announced by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)'s National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) and the Department of Energy (DOE). With this new grant, BCCC can maximize the fibrous sorghum stalk material for use as high-value feedstock. It also supports NCBiotech's commitment to find ways to maximize value from farmland in North Carolina and the entire Southeastern region. The BCCC grant is part of a USDA/DOE grant in the federal Biomass Research and Development Initiative (BRDI), a joint program through NIFA and the DOE. BRDI aims to develop sustainable sources of biomass and increase the availability of renewable fuels and bio-based products. Research and Developmenthttps://biotechnologyforbiofuels.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13068-016-0647-2 Oleaginous yeasts have been studied for lipid production. However, yeasts store lipids intracellularly, making recovery difficult and expensive. Therefore, National Renewable Energy Laboratory researchers led by Wei Wang investigate fatty acid-derived products which can be easily recovered and upgraded to fuels. The team aimed to produce fatty alcohols from Yarrowia lipolytica and Lipomyces starkeyi, by expressing the fatty acyl-CoA reductase gene from Marinobactor aquaeolei. The team was able to produce 167 and 770 mg/L of fatty alcohols in shake flask from Y. lipolytica and L. starkeyi, respectively. When using a dodecane overlay during fermentation, almost all total fatty alcohols produced by Y. lipolytica and L. starkeyi were extracted into the dodecane phase. In both yeasts, long chain length and saturated fatty alcohols were predominant. This study proves that oleaginous yeasts can serve as platforms for the production of fatty acid-derived biofuels.
http://biotechnologyforbiofuels.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13068-016-0642-7 Triacylglycerols (TAGs) are the most abundant form of storage oil in plants. The diacylglycerol O-acyltransferase (DGAT1) is the rate-limiting enzyme responsible for the TAG biosynthesis in seeds. Direct upregulation of TAG biosynthesis in seeds and vegetative tissues through overexpression of the DGAT1 could significantly impact biofuel production. The team of Devendra Kumar Maravi from the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati generated transgenic Jatropha curcas plants expressing an Arabidopsis DGAT1 gene. The resulting transgenic plants showed a dramatic increase in lipid content in leaves as well as in seeds and an overall increase in TAGs compared to the wild-type plants. The increase in oil content in transgenic plants is accompanied with increase in average plant height, seeds per tree, 100-seed weight, and seed length and breadth. The enhanced TAG accumulation in transgenic plants also had no penalty on the growth rates, growth patterns, leaf number, and leaf size of plants. The strategy used in this study to enhance oil accumulation in both seeds and leaves of Jatropha could make it more sustainable for biofuel production.
Researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory made the surprise discovery that a metabolic pathway to take up CO2 exists and functions in a microorganism capable of breaking down and fermenting cellulosic biomass to produce biofuels. Clostridium thermocellum directly converts cellulosic materials into biofuels and release CO2 as a byproduct, decreasing the maximum amount of products the microorganism can produce. The scientists found the addition of a form of CO2, known as bicarbonate, into the bacteria medium promotes the growth of C. thermocellum. This enhanced growth implies the bacterium can consume CO2. The researchers tracked how CO2 enters the cell, and identified the enzymes critical to CO2 fixation, and how it is incorporated into products thereby discovering a new metabolic route unknown to the scientific community. The pathway enables the bacterium to use both CO2 and organic carbons during its growth. These findings pave the way to future engineering of this bacterium to consume cellulose and CO2 simultaneously to improve carbon yield. Biofuels ProcessingScientists at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale De Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland have turned lignin into a source of biofuel by simply adding a common chemical, formaldehyde. The novel method converts up to 80% of lignin into valuable compounds for biofuel and plastics and can be scaled up to industrial levels. Lignin is an enormously complex biopolymer, filling the hard wall of the plant cell and makes up almost a third of plant biomass. The problem is that lignin is difficult to extract and transform due to its instability. An international team of researchers led by Jeremy Luterbacher at EPFL have revealed that they can easily break lignin apart simply by adding formaldehyde to the process. Formaldehyde, a widely used chemical, stabilizes lignin and prevents it from degrading, leading to significantly higher yields of building blocks that can be used to make substitutes for petrochemicals. A new study from Argonne National Laboratory has shown the potential of an algae fractionation process to produce biodiesel with 63–68 percent lower greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions than common diesel. In algal biofuel production, lipids are extracted from algae and converted to renewable diesel, while the non-lipid components are converted to biogas. This biogas is then used for renewable heat and electricity to power the conversion process. However, in the algae fractionation process, the carbohydrates in the non-lipid components are converted to ethanol instead of biogas, thus producing two fuels, renewable diesel and ethanol. The increased biofuel outputs can lower the cost of the biofuels from algae. However, without the biogas, the algae fractionation requires more energy. Scientists then used life-cycle analysis to analyze if the energy required for the process would still result in lower GHG emissions. The results were positive, showing lower GHG emissions from algae fractionation compared to the use of conventional petroleum diesel. |
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