Ohio State awarded $1.6M from ARPA-E for transformational energy technology
The Ohio State University College of Engineering today announced a $1.6 million award from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E). The funding will be used to develop engineered microbial consortia for advanced and efficient biofuel production from renewable biomass with higher product yields and zero CO2 emissions.
“This award comes at a critical time in the research and development of our technology,” said Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Professor Shang-Tian Yang, the project’s principal investigator. “It will enable us to take our potentially game-changing biobutanol production method to the next level. We are thrilled to work with ARPA-E and be a part of their innovative research portfolio.”
Biobutanol, along with a growing number of other plant-based products, are made almost exclusively via fermentation. Current methods for biobutanol production can waste more than a third of the carbon in the feedstock as carbon dioxide in the fermentation step alone. This waste adds greenhouse gas emissions, limits product yields, and squanders valuable carbon feedstock. Preventing the loss of carbon as CO2 during bioconversion, or potentially incorporating external CO2 into bioconversions, could lower emissions and increase the yield of bioconversion processes.
Butanol is generally used as an industrial solvent, but can also be blended with gasoline. Biobutanol is produced from fermentation of the same feedstocks as ethanol – corn, sugar beets, and other types of biomass. Currently, the predominant method to produce biobutanol is ABE fermentation, the anaerobic conversion of carbohydrates by strains of Clostridium bacteria into acetone, butanol and ethanol.
The project team will develop a novel fermentation process by combining three bacterial species and an electrochemically-reduced formate to maximize carbon conversion and butanol production with zero or negative CO2 emissions. With a 50% higher product yield from glucose compared with ABE fermentation of corn, biobutanol can be produced at prices that compete with gasoline and bioethanol.
Yang leads one of 15 teams to receive an award from ARPA-E’s Energy and Carbon Optimized Synthesis for the Bioeconomy (ECOSynBio) program, which focuses on optimizing biofuel manufacturing while reducing carbon waste. Ohio State’s team also includes co-PIs Ting Lu at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and alumnus Jie Dong at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.
“Biofuel is a powerful tool in the clean energy toolkit that has immense potential to power our ships and airlines with zero carbon emissions,” said Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm. “DOE is investing in research to reduce emissions and maximize the availability of efficient biofuel as we strive to reach President Biden’s net-zero carbon goals.”
-Story by College of Engineering
