In Colorado, the expected decline in the number of landfills across the United States coupled with bans on disposing large amounts of organic waste in landfills that have been enacted in multiple states has prompted researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) to examine other ways to grapple with […]
Breaking news came in today from the wonders down under, Australia-based Licella, in their joint venture with Canfor (Arbios Biotech) – a just inked a new global alliance with Shell Catalysts & Technologies that aims to create low-carbon, circular economy focused biorefinery, with Licella’s Cat-HTR (Catalytic Hydrothermal Reactor) technology at the core. In today’s Digest, […]
It was a big week of news for Licella and their Cat-HTR platform in Australia with two soft plastic project announcements. First, Licella joined forces with a group of high-profile companies like Nestlé and LyondellBasell, who have collaborated to produce Australia’s first soft plastic food wrapper made with food-grade recycled content. Second, Licella launched a […]
In Washington, D.C., American small businesses received a near-$44 million boost from the Energy Department’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program. Selected small businesses are receiving Phase II Release 2 grants that demonstrate commercial feasibility for innovations during the second phase of their research. Awards range from […]
In Washington, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory scientists have developed a model that predicts outcomes from the algae hydrothermal liquefaction process in a way that mirrors commercial reality much more closely than previous analyses. They found that algae with higher lipid content is key to reducing costs, and that two factors—algae composition and capital investment—are the […]
Parents may tell their kids to eat all the food on their plate, we may know all the lyrics to Weird Al Yankovic’s “Just Eat It” satire song, or even watched the movie about foods waste called “Just Eat It,” but according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, food waste is still […]
In Russia, scientists from Skoltech and the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Joint Institute for High Temperatures proposed a new way to convert food waste into biofuel via hydrothermal liquefaction – a thermal depolymerization process used to turn wet biomass into oil. Other researchers use carbohydrates fermentation or fat transesterification for biofuel production but since only […]
The DOE established and funded a project to develop a novel Multistage Hydrothermal Liquefaction (HTL) of biomass and integrate with Virent’s Catalytic BioForming Process to efficiently produce cost effective “drop‐in” fuels from woody biomass and corn stover, with particular focus in maximizing jet fuel and diesel yields. Virent CTO Randy Cortright gave this illuminating presentation […]
Hydrothermal liquefaction has a huge fan base in the biorefinery R&D sector. There’s lots to like. It’s robust tech and can be applied to attractive, low-cost wet feedstocks (ag resid, sludge, manure) that exploit HTL attributes and minimize deployment challenges associated with pumping. It’s conceptually simple (feed preparation, pump, heated pipe, gravity separate biocrude). HTL […]
