Ask a biofuel researcher to name the single greatest technical barrier to cost-effective ethanol, and you’re likely to receive a one-word response: lignin.
Cellulosic ethanol—fuel derived from woody plants and waste biomass—has the potential to become an
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When the Ford Motor Company’s first automobile, the Model T, debuted in 1908, it ran on a corn-derived biofuel called ethanol, a substance Henry Ford dubbed “the fuel of the future.”
Researchers at the Department of Energy’s BioEnergy Science Center are looking beyond the usual suspects in the search for microbes that can efficiently break down inedible plant matter for conversion to biofuels.
Lives of soldiers and others injured in remote locations could be saved with a cell-free protein synthesis system developed at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
The device, a creation of a team led by Andrea Timm and Scott Retterer
Supercomputing simulations at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory could change how researchers understand the internal motions of proteins that play functional, structural and regulatory roles in all living organisms.
Bioenergy researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory have explained the molecular mechanism of an effect that has puzzled scientists for years.
Thawing permafrost and contaminated sediment in marine coastal areas pose some of the greatest risks for the production of highly toxic methylmercury, according to findings published in the journal Science Advances.
The discovery of these newly identified
Plants and other biomass can be converted into a variety of renewable high-value products including carbon fibers, plastics, and liquid fuels such as ethanol and biodiesel that are beneficial for reducing petroleum use and vehicle emissions.
Viruses are tiny—merely millionths of a millimeter in diameter—but what they lack in size, they make up in quantity.
Another barrier to commercially viable biofuels from sources other than corn has fallen with the engineering of a microbe that improves isobutanol yields by a factor of 10.
The finding of the Department of Energy’s BioEnergy Science Center, published in t