The ARPA-E Awards

No, not the ESPY awards, not the Oscars, but government funding for "out-of-the-box" energy research.

This is really, really cool.

There is some debate whether it was Al Gore or ARPA that discovered/promoted/invented the internet, but be that as it may, ARPA is an interesting government agency. Yes, DARPA was involved with the internet from the outset.

ARPE-E, funding provided by the Department of Agency, has announced 66 projects garnering a total of $130 million to research sources of future energy supplies and/or savings.

The two largest areas of funding are Advanced Fuels and Grid Modernization, both of which get around $24 million or 18% of the pie. This is split among 13 fuel projects, and 9 grid-related projects.

With the growing supply of natural gas that is coming from the developing shale gas reserves in the country, it is perhaps no surprise to see that methane conversion to liquid fuel captures the largest part of the fuel funding this year, being the theme of nine of the awards.

The largest award:

The largest of the fuel awards goes to Allylix, a company that specializes in terpenes, and who is tasked with turning these into a viable aviation fuel. Specific genes needed for terpene production are extracted from a biosource, and then optimized for use in a yeast host. The optimization is an engineered change that can increase product yield several hundred fold (according to their website). From that point there is a fermentation process, and then a recovery and purification of the liquid fuel, which is stated to be already commercially viable.

One gene source for turpenes could be resin-producing pine trees. I guess that really stick stuff you can't get off your fingers when you pick up a pine cone.

There is only one algae award this year:

The award will go to Cornell for $910K, and they will look at using light fibers in a small reactor as a means of improving economics.  [Rounding: $1 million.]

Back to that terpene story, from a story unrelated to these new awards:

From Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory comes the announcement that researchers with the U.S Department of Energy’s Joint BioEnergy Institute have identified a potential new advanced biofuel that could replace today’s standard fuel for diesel engines.  It would be clean, green, renewable and produced in the U.S.

JBEI research team used synthetic biology tools to engineer strains of two microbes, a bacteria and yeast, to produce a precursor to bisabolane, a member of the terpene class of chemical compounds that are found in plants and used in fragrances and flavorings. Preliminary tests by the team showed that bisabolane’s properties make it a promising biosynthetic alternative to No. 2 diesel fuel.

Researchers at JBEI are pursuing the fundamental science needed to make production of advanced biofuels cost-effective on a national scale. One of the avenues being explored is sesquiterpenes, terpene compounds that contain 15 carbon atoms (diesel fuel typically contains 10 to 24 carbon atoms). [Sesquiterpenes: think sagebrush.]

So, not only will it have a nice fragrant, the new advanced biofuel would be.... produced in the US. Yummy.

Sounds a lot like algae.