In the United Kingdom, the red paper poppies that adorn war memorials, graves, and lapels to memorialize the commonwealth’s casualties of war and symbolize hope for a peaceful future on Remembrance Day will soon be completely biodegradable. The new poppies will swap plastic “stems” for fiberboard on 130,000 wreaths, beginning in 2023, according to the […]
Today, the Digest turns 12. Since the Digest was launched in July 2007, we’ve had the privilege of telling the amazing success story of the bioeconomy— new applications, companies, and platform technologies have been pouring out of research labs and many of them are deploying rapidly at commercial scale. If you’ve seen the rise of […]
The pace of invention and change is just too strong, we’ve realized, to highlight annual or even quarterly or monthly rankings and summaries of significant product and service advances. For now, we’re going to be tracking these on a weekly basis to keep pace with the changes. Here are the top innovations for the week […]
In the UK and France, manufacturing biofuels from food crop by-products such as straw could be made quicker and cheaper thanks to the work of scientists in the UK and France. Researchers funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) have discovered variant straw plants whose cell walls are more easily broken down […]
Tired of corn, corn, corn or cane, cane, cane? There are 101 feedstocks in the biofuels canon. Here’s what’s up with each of them, and all of them. In Florida, Biofuels Digest released its annual Guide to biofuels feedstocks, tracking 10,658 items published in the Digest in the past 48 months on 101 feedstocks for […]
Trains to Nowhere, Camel-tummy microbes, a nation run on coconuts, “vibrating blob” tunicates, a high-performing fungus, a cousin of the potato blight microbe, biofuels from a “raging fireball”. 2012-13 stands up with any year for stories both inspiring and bizarre. Another year in Digestville has come and gone — and along with so many straightforward […]
Trains to Nowhere, Camel-tummy microbes, a nation run on coconuts, “vibrating blob” tunicates, a high-performing fungus, a cousin of the potato blight microbe, biofuels from a “raging fireball”. 2012-13 stands up with any year for stories both inspiring and bizarre. Another year in Digestville has come and gone — and along with so many straightforward […]
Could biomass briquette mills and improved cook stoves undermine the Taliban — for one percent of what the US now spends? From time to time, we report on correspondence exchanged with our veterans and serving men and women in the field, on the subject of the strategic and tactical opportunities in biofuels and bioenergy. This […]
One week ago, the RAND organization published a report assaying and critiquing the military efforts to develop advanced biofuels – in particular focusing on Fisher-Tropsch renewable fuels, fuels from algae and fuels from oilseed crops. The renewable fuels industry and the US Navy were, in particular, aghast at the report’s findings. In particular, the algal […]
In the US, Syracuse University has announced a partnership with entrepreneurs John Fox ’92 and Wayne Arden to advance the use of biofuels by the U.S. armed forces as an alternative energy source. The initial project, in Afghanistan, will introduce biodiesel crop farming for guaranteed income as an alternative to poppy growing, and look at […]
