澳门六合彩开奖结果走势图 researchers are taking part in three clean energy grants totaling almost $4.5 million by the U.S. Department of Energy. The grants are among 15 funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency 鈥 Energy (ARPA-E) with the goal of making production of biofuels more efficient.
Biofuels such as ethanol, biodiesel and other products are usually made by fermentation of organic material. During the conversion process, some amount of carbon from the original material is lost as carbon dioxide. The overall goal of the program is to make biofuel production more efficient by reducing waste and carbon dioxide emissions.
鈥淏iofuel is a powerful tool in the clean energy toolkit that has immense potential to power our ships and airlines with zero carbon emissions,鈥 said Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm in a news release announcing the grants. 鈥淒OE is investing in research to reduce emissions and maximize the availability of efficient biofuel as we strive to reach President Biden鈥檚 net-zero carbon goals.鈥
A grant of $1.6 million was awarded to a team led by , assistant professor in the Department of Plant Biology, College of Biological Sciences, for a 鈥渢eam approach鈥 to making fuels with microbes. When fermentation is carried out by a single microorganism, efficiency is limited by the unavoidable loss of carbon dioxide from core metabolic processes. But by adding an organism that can generate chemical products from simple molecules such as carbon dioxide, efficiency can be improved because the carbon dioxide produced by one organism is recycled by the other.
Metal catalysts
A grant of just over $1 million to Zymochem, Inc. based in San Leandro, in collaboration with Professors and in the 澳门六合彩开奖结果走势图 Department of Chemistry, College of Letters and Science, will fund development of processes that use electricity and novel metal catalysts.
Berben鈥檚 lab has developed inexpensive metal catalysts to convert electricity and carbon dioxide into formate that microbes can use as a source of energy. Atsumi鈥檚 lab has built fermentation systems that integrate the use of electricity, carbon dioxide and metal catalysts to enable bacteria to both grow and convert sugars into more valuable chemicals.
鈥淚n this ARPA-E project, we will combine the 澳门六合彩开奖结果走势图 technologies with Zymochem鈥檚 technology for the production of chemicals at 100 percent carbon efficiency,鈥 Atsumi said.
Professor , also in the Department of Chemistry, will work with Han Li, assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular enginering at UC Irvine on a $1.8 million project on converting carboxylic acids to fuels and products. Compared to sugars, carboxylic acids (an example of which is acetic acid in vinegar) can be made in large quantities from food and industrial wastes. But natural biological pathways for converting carboxylic acid to other products suffer from a low carbon yield. The UCI project will address this with a cell-free enzymatic process. If successful, it will be the first biological platform to convert carboxylic acids into a broad range of fuels and commodities with greater than 100% carbon efficiency.