BETO looks to potentially fund applied research to boost algae biofuel production methods

In Washington, the Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy arm of the Department of Energy’s Bioenergy Technology Office (BETO) made a Funding Opportunity Announcement that will support an applied research focus on biological variables which contribute most greatly to the modeled minimum fuel selling price of algal biofuels. These biological variables include: biomass productivity; biomass composition (e.g., lipid, protein, and carbohydrate content); predation and pathogen resistance; halotolerance; heat and cold tolerance; and high-intensity light (i.e., direct sunlight) tolerance. Supporting advanced biology research approaches to enable high productivity in applied “field setting” cultivation conditions that are representative of future scaled-up cultivation conditions will accelerate progress towards EERE’s technical milestones for algal biofuels and will fill a gap between bench-scale research and pre-pilot efforts. Improved and more environmentally robust strains are necessary for breakthrough reductions in algal biofuel costs. This FOA seeks to fund multidisciplinary biological innovation that will deliver strains, tools, data, and techniques to enhance algal biofuel potential and enable accelerated future innovation in algal biofuels and bioproducts.

It is anticipated that the FOA may include the following Areas of Interest:

Area of Interest One, Strain Improvement: Development of enhanced algal strains with increased areal productivity and biofuel intermediate yield. Strain improvement developments will include isolation, directed evolution, breeding, and/or genetic engineering of novel algal strains that can reproducibly out-perform the current best available strains in outdoor conditions, where “performance” is represented by productivity, robustness, and composition.

Area of Interest Two, Cultivation Improvement: Development of increased areal productivity and biofuel intermediate yield through enhanced management of ecological or abiotic contributions to cultivation biology. Cultivation biology development improvements will include leveraging natural or designed microbial assemblages of the cultivation ecosystem to boost performance and exclude pathogens, and understanding under what cultivation conditions should certain strains be employed. This Area of Interest is not focused on engineering a better cultivation system.

For both Areas of Interest, selected projects will support the development of at least one novel tool, technique (method), or dataset that upon completion of the project will enable developers to accelerate innovation in that topic area. The types of tools, techniques, and datasets of interest span biological, computational, and analytic strategies that will advance the state of technology and are complementary to the scope of improvement development work.

EERE envisions awarding multiple financial assistance awards in the form of cooperative agreements. The estimated period of performance for each award will be approximately 36 months.

This is a Notice of Intent (NOI) only. EERE may issue a FOA as described herein, may issue a FOA that is significantly different than the FOA described herein, or EERE may not issue a FOA at all.