Biomass
Researchers at Virginia Tech, led by Associate Professor Percival Zhang, have developed a process by which approximately 30% of the cellulose from any plant material (including agricultural waste) can be converted into a starch known as amylose. Amylose can be used in food or as biodegradable packaging. Cellulose and starch have the same chemical composiition – the difference being their chemical linkages. Professor Percival Zhang's team used an enzyme cascade to break up the bonds in cellulose, enabling their reconfiguration as the starch, amylose. Amylose s a good source of dietay fibre and has been shown to decrease the risk … Continue Reading
Researchers at Virginia Tech have discovered a way to extract large quantities of hydrogen from any plant, a breakthrough that has the potential to be a low-cost, environmentally friendly fuel source. Associate Proffessor Y.H. Percival Zhang and his team have succeeded in using xylose, the most abundant simple plant sugar, to produce a large quantity of hydrogen. The method can use any source of biomass. Unlike previous methods of producing hydrogen from biomass, which are expensive and release greenhouse gases, the new process releases almost no greenhouse gasses and does not require costly materials or heavy metals. The hydrogen is … Continue Reading
Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley have discovered that a long-abandoned process, once used to turn starch into explosives, can be used to efficiently produce diesel fuel from plant sources such as corn, sugar cane, grasses and other fast-growing plants or trees. The process of bacterial fermentation was discovered nearly 100 years ago by Chaim Weizmann, a chemist who later became the first president of Israel. It uses a bacterium, clostridium acetobutylicum, to ferment sugars and turn them into acetone, butanol and ethanol. This process was used by the British to manufacture cordite for explosives during the First World … Continue Reading
British researchers have identified a genetic trait that causes willow trees to yield five times more biofuel if they grow diagonally, compared with those that are allowed to grow naturally up towards the sky. Scientists led by Dr Nicholas Brereton and Dr Michael Ray, both from the Imperial College London, found that when willows grow at an angle, such as when they are bent by strong winds, they produce high-energy sugar molecules in an attempt to strengthen their stems and straighten the plant upwards. These high-energy sugars can be fermented into biofuels when the trees are harvested, although the process … Continue Reading
A team of scientists at MIT have genetically altered a common soil bacteria called Ralstonia eutropha into producing biofuel and expelling biofuel into its growing medium instead of retaining it within its body. Normally, biofuel is extracted from bacteria by crushing it; the new process is analagous to milking. The biofuel, isobutanol, can be blended with, or substitured for, petrol without refining. Ordinarily, when their regular carbon food sources become scarce, R. eutropha respond by synthesizing a type of polymer, in which they store whatever carbon they are able to find. The team of MIT biologists were able to modify … Continue Reading
Biolite has developed a portable camp stove that uses the heat from the fire to also generate electricity for charging batteries. The company has another model under development designed to provide electricity, as well as a clean-burning cooking stove, for developing countries.
Seaweed would seem to an ideal source of biomass for making renewable fuels. Kelp has a high sugar content; it doesn’t need farmland or fresh water and large quantities can be sustainably harvested. Harvesting the kelp which is already growing along 3% of the world’s coastlines could potentially produce 60 billion gallons of ethanol. The problem with kelp is that its primary sugar, alginate, could not be broken down efficiently enough to produce biofuel on an industrial scale. Now, scientists from the Bio Architecture Laboratory in Berkeley, California, have genetically engineered a strain of E. coli bacteria capable of digesting … Continue Reading
A study commissioned by the International Energy Agency has concluded that combining energy production from biomass with carbon capture and storage has the potential to reduce annual CO2 emissions by almost a third. According to Joris Koornneef from Ecofys, who conducted the study, "The combination actually removes CO2 from the atmosphere, The biomass extracts CO2 from the atmosphere during photosynthesis and the CCS takes out the CO2 released in the energy conversion process." Currently, about 31 gigatonnes of CO2 is emitted from energy-related processes each year. According to the study, using biomass to produce energy and capturing and storing the … Continue Reading
Researchers at the Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation in Oklahoma have reported a genetic discovery that allows individual plants to produce more biomass. This means that biofuel crops could have higher yields without increasing their agricultural footprint. Dr Huanzhong Wang has discovered a gene that controls the production of lignin within the stems of arabidopsis and medicago truncatula, plants that are commonly used in genetic studies. Lignin is a compound that adds strength to plant cell walls, which gives stems their rigidity. When the gene was removed, there was a marked increase in the production of lignin and other biomass throughout … Continue Reading
Researchers at Virginia Tech, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Georgia have produced hydrogen gas pure enough to power a fuel cell from cellulosic materials (from wood chips) using a mixture of 14 enzymes, one coenzyme and water heated to about 32°C. Jonathan Mielenz, leader of the Bioconversion Science and Technology Group at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory said that "It is exciting because using cellulose instead of starch expands the renewable resource for producing hydrogen to include biomass." The "one pot" process involves three advances a novel combination of enzymes an increased hydrogen generation rate — to … Continue Reading
Videos
Renewables News- Dysol Aiming to Print Storage with Solar CellsAustralia's Dyesol Limited has acquired an equity stake in Printed Power Pte Ltd, a spinoff company of Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Printed Power is focussing on integrating dye solar cell technology with printed storage and power management systems to … Continue Reading → […]
- CSIRO Printer Makes 10m of Solar Cells a MinuteCSIRO researchers have built a gigantic printer that spits out solar cells at a rate of about ten metres a minute. The printer system uses existing technology to embed polymer solar cells (also known as organic solar cells) in thin … Continue Reading → […]
- New Aussie Technology to Clean Polluted WaterScientists from Deakin University, together with French colleagues, say that they have manufactured a lightweight and reusable material that can absorb up to 33 times its weight in a wide range of spilt oils, chemical solvents and dyes, while repelling … Continue Reading → […]
- Dysol Aiming to Print Storage with Solar Cells
