Joint BioEnergy Institute dedicated in California; $125 million DOE grant aims for “new, deliverable biofuels in the next five years”

In California, US Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman officially dedicated the Joint BioEnergy Institute, which brings together scientists from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the University of California at Berkeley and UC Davis andother institutions. The mission of the Institute is to turn a $125 million grant from the US Department of Energy into a platform for “new, deliverable biofuels in the next five years”. The institute is investigating the development of plants whose cellulose can be broken down more easily, the development of synthetic enzymes, and the bioengineering of high-yield alternatives to yeast fermentation.

Together with the $500 million invested by British Petroleum in UC Berkeley’s Energy Bioscience Institute, the investments are the largest announced in the US in the last several years from R&D in support of advanced biofuels.

Two other Bioenergy Research Centers were established by the DOE last year with $125 million grants: the DOE BioEnergy Science Center led by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, and the DOE Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center led by the University of Wisconsin in collaboration with Michigan State University.

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