biofuels

(Yale University) A conference on the social and ecological sustainability of biofuels and the impact of their production on the forests of Central and South America will take place on Friday, Dec. 5, in Panama City, Panama.

(University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) The National Science Foundation announced this month that it is funding a new research effort at the University of Illinois aimed at understanding how -- and whether it is possible -- to build sustainable infrastructure to support the emerging biofuels industry.

(Worcester Polytechnic Institute) Can biofuels produced from non-food plant products ever become a commercial reality?

Can plants be engineered to grow vaccines or anti-cancer drugs? These and other questions were explored by researchers from Worcester Polytechnic Institute and the Arkansas Bioscience Institute at a symposium today at WPI.

The answer to these questions may soon be "yes" and teams from WPI and ABI are advancing the science and technology needed to reach those ends.

It may be one of the biggest green gambles of the century: a national goal of converting wood, grass, corn stalks and garbage into 16 billion gallons of cellulosic biofuels annually by 2022.

(Stevens Institute of Technology) Stevens Institute of Technology has been awarded $1 million from the US Department of Energy to support research and development into biomass conversion technologies.

If your experiment doesn’t go the way you expect, take a closer look — something even more interesting may have happened.

That strategy has led scientists at Brookhaven to discover a fundamental shift in an enzyme’s function that could help expand the toolbox for engineering biofuels and other plant-based oil products.

(Ohio State University) Researchers here have found a way to convert ethanol and other biofuels into hydrogen very efficiently.

A new catalyst makes hydrogen from ethanol with 90 percent yield, at a workable temperature, and using inexpensive ingredients.

The new catalyst is much less expensive than others being developed around the world, because it does not contain precious metals, such as platinum or rhodium.

New research could help with the large-scale cultivation and manufacturing of oil-rich algae in oceans for biofuel.

Algae are a diverse and simple group of organisms that live in or near water. Certain algal species are high in oil content that could be converted into such fuels as biodiesel, according researchers.

Algae also have several environmentally-friendly advantages over corn or other plants used for biofuels, including not needing soil or fresh water to grow.

Biofuels can be a sustainable part of the world's energy future, especially if bioenergy agriculture is developed on currently abandoned or degraded agricultural lands.

Using these lands for energy crops, instead of converting existing croplands or clearing new land, avoids competition with food production and preserves carbon-storing forests needed to mitigate climate change.

(American Society for Microbiology) The answer to the looming fuel crisis in the 21st century may be found by thinking small, microscopic in fact.

Microscopic organisms from bacteria and cyanobacteria, to fungi to microalgae, are biological factories that are proving to efficient sources of inexpensive, environmentally friendly biofuels that can serve as alternatives to oil, according to research presented at the 108th General Meeting of the American Society for Microbiology.