Research: Areas of Focus
Posted on Aug 6, 2007 in Featured |
In the United States and around the world, agricultural and forestry activities create considerable excess plant biomass that has little or no economic value and are often discarded as waste. These feedstocks, such as corn stalks, wood chips and other plant materials, contain energy in the form of sugars, which could be used to create new sources of sustainable, renewable energy.
The Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center (GLBRC) will advance these goals through five areas of research.
Improved plant biomass
The inability of many plants to store carbon-rich hydrocarbons, as well as difficulties in breaking down cell walls in plants, present barriers to using biomass for bioenergy production. Increasing hydrocarbons in plants and strategies to more easily degrade cell walls are long-term goals of the GLBRC for improving plant biomass.
Biomass processing
Efficiently converting plant biomass to sugars is a major challenge to the economical production of bioenergy products. To remove this bottleneck, new treatments are needed for processing feedstocks such as corn stover, switchgrass or wood chips. In this area, the long-term goal of the GLBRC will be to develop new physical and biological ways to process plant biomass.
Bioconversion
To improve how we convert biomass into energy products, the GLBRC will explore solutions to easily convert plant-derived chemicals to bioenergy compounds. The long-term goals of the GLBRC are to improve methods for converting biomass into ethanol and to develop ways to convert plant material into hydrogen, electricity or other chemical feedstocks that can replace fossil fuels.
Development of a sustainable bioenergy economy
For a bioenergy economy to positively impact the United States, we must address complex issues in agricultural, industrial, environmental and behavioral systems. Within this area, the GLBRC will take a holistic approach to evaluating the economic and environmental sustainability of transforming biomass to biofuel.
Enabling technologies
This focus crosses all areas of research, creating the tools that make it possible to integrate new technologies into bioenergy research. The center’s success depends on sharing the biological, physical and computational research that enable biomass production, processing, conversion and sustainability.
View an alphabetical list of GLBRC project leaders here
