In California, California Ethanol + Power (CE+P) announced that it is partnering with the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI), a Bioenergy Research Center of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to develop scalable next-generation renewable energy products using biomass from CE+P’s planned sugarcane ethanol facility in Imperial County, Calif. In addition, CE+P Permitting Manager Nathan M. […]
In California, hoping to discover new and improved ways of processing plant material for industrial purposes, researchers from UC Santa Barbara (UCSB) and the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) have been studying the gut microbiomes of the planet’s most prolific herbivores: ruminant animals such as goats. The team generated reconstructions of the many thousands of microbial […]
In California, three new projects by scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Joint BioEnergy Institute, could make agriculture both more sustainable and more profitable by aiming to quantify and reduce the carbon intensity of agriculture, including the farming of biofuel feedstocks such as corn, soy, and sorghum, while also increasing yield. Crop-based biofuels […]
In California, one strategy to make biofuels more competitive is to make plants do some of the work themselves. Scientists can engineer plants to produce valuable chemical compounds, or bioproducts, as they grow. Then the bioproducts can be extracted from the plant and the remaining plant material can be converted into fuel. When produced in […]
In California, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) scientists and collaborators at the Joint BioEnergy Institute have identified a molecular mechanism in bacteria that can be manipulated to promote tolerance to imidazolium ionic liquid (IIL) solvents, and therefore overcome a key gap in biofuel and biochemical production processes. The research appears in the Journal of Bacteriology. […]
In California, Greencar Congress reports that researchers from JBEI along with Chinese colleagues have produced three promising aviation jet fuel feedstocks whose results were recently published in open-access journal Biotechnology for Biofuels. Researchers undertook computational analysis looking at three sesquiterpenes—epi-isozizaene, pentalenene and α-isocomene—and found they were comparable to commercial fossil-based jet fuel. They were then […]
In California, from the distinct smell of eucalyptus to the flavor of wine, terpenes are ubiquitous. A diverse group of plant-produced organic compounds, terpenes play key roles in plant growth, defense, and environmental interactions. Terpenes are also economically important because of their use in industrial materials, pharmaceutical products, and as biofuel precursors. Collectively, hundreds of […]
In California, a closed-loop biorefinery could dramatically lower the cost of biofuels and related products. In this approach, the refinery produces the solvents it needs, rather than “importing” them. Scientists at the Joint BioEnergy Institute are developing a closed-loop biorefinery concept that uses waste lignin as a potential process solvent. How? They synthesized a new […]
In California, researchers at the Department of Energy’s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have discovered a new enzyme that will enable microbial production of a renewable alternative to petroleum-based toluene, a widely used octane booster in gasoline that has a global market of twenty nine million tons per year. […]
JBEI’s mission is to convert biomass to biofuels. The goal is to provide the nation with clean, renewable transportation fuels identical to gasoline, diesel and jet fuel. Inside JBEI’s Emeryville laboratories, researchers are using the latest tools in molecular biology, chemical engineering, computational and robotic technologies, and pioneering work in synthetic biology to transform biomass […]
