The strategic area will have the following activities for research: feedstock development, conversion processes, system integration, and public policy matters.
Overcoming Biomass Recalcitrance Most biomass energy is “locked up” as inaccessible carbohydrates in the form of cellulose and hemicellulose. Fermentation of these carbohydrates could generate significant quantities of ethanol, a versatile liquid fuel that fits well with our existing vehicle fleet and fuel distribution infrastructure. That is, cellulose and hemicellulose could do this if they were not so difficult to convert to fermentable sugars. If we are to unlock the potential of biomass replace fossil fuels, particularly as sources of liquid transportation fuels, we must overcome this problem, frequently described as biomass “recalcitrance”.
Biomass materials are solids, and there are obvious difficulties associated with using these materials as direct replacements for liquid transportation fuels. As this picture illustrates, it is difficult to fuel your car directly on biomass. The BCRC seeks to overcome the recalcitrance of biomass and convert biomass to liquid fuel products using ammonia to increase the reactivity of cellulose and hemicellulose. This process, called ammonia fiber explosion or AFEX, is followed by biological conversion using enzymes, microbes or other approaches to produce liquid fuels and chemicals.
Coproducing Food and Fuel A frequent concern about biomass fuels is that they might reduce food supplies. We believe the opposite is true—we believe the evidence is that large scale conversion of lignocellulosic biomass to fuels and chemicals will make human food and animal feed both cheaper and more abundant as foods/feeds are coproduced with fuels and chemicals from plant biomass. For example, much plant biomass also contains protein, a valuable animal feed/human food. Our studies show that we can simultaneously reduce the amount of land required to generate large amounts of fuel from biomass and improve the overall process economics by recovering protein within an overall system producing fuels and chemicals from biomass. For more details, see NRDC's "Growing Energy" report in the "Publications" section..
Biorefinery Approach Ultimately, plant material will be converted to fuels, chemicals, feeds and foods in large, integrated processing systems called “biorefineries”. These biorefineries will be intimately linked with the crop production systems supplying the plant raw materials and probably with animal feeding systems using the protein coproducts from the biorefinery. Corn wet mills and corn dry mills, such as this Archer Daniels Midland corn wet mill in Decatur, Illinois, are prototypes of future cellulosic biorefineries. We seek to understand the behavior of these biorefineries within the context of the overall systems in which they will operate, particularly the planetary cycles of carbon and nitrogen in which these human systems are embedded.
Collaborating with industrial, academic, related Biomass conservation programmes and other research, development and commercialization efforts is central to that agenda.
