In August, President Obama announced that the U.S. Departments of Agriculture, Energy and Navy will invest up to $510 million over the next three years to produce biofuels for aviation and marine vehicles, making drop-in biofuels a national priority.

The Navy alone would need 336 million gallons of drop-in advanced biofuel each year to meet their target of obtaining half of their energy from alternative sources by 2020.

Scientists at the GLBRC are using synthetic biology and E. coli bacteria to generate the cellulosic biofuel technologies needed to meet this massive call for drop-in fuels.

Pfleger in the lab

"In an ideal world, you could go to the gas station and fill up your car or truck with a biofuel that is indistinguishable from today's petroleum derived fuels," says Brian Pfleger, GLBRC project leader and assistant professor of chemical and biological engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "If we can successfully develop methods of producing fuels from cellulosic biomass, we can reduce the need for new fueling infrastructure and the problems associated with that enormous change." 

Creating biofuels from region-specific biomass could make a huge dent in fossil fuel use for transportation. But moving lightweight, bulky biomass from farms to factories could leave a large carbon footprint, and get expensive quickly.

So quickly, in fact, that in order to be economically viable, plant biomass would need to come from an area no more than 50 miles away from where it will be processed into fuel.

A sustainability research team at the GLBRC is working to solve biofuel supply chain issues by exploring a new intermediate structure for gathering, processing and converting biomass into cellulosic biofuels. The proposed structure, called Regional Biomass Processing Depots (RBPDs), could improve both the economics and the sustainability of the biomass supply chain by keeping a portion of pretreatment and processing closer to the farm.

Read the full story at GLBRC.org.