Research will target innovation into new pathways to renewable energy. DOE spreads the love with funding across a number of energy themes, such as this one: electrofuels. …
… “Electrofuels – Biofuels from Electricity — Today’s technologies for making biofuels all rely on photosynthesis – either indirectly by converting plants to fuels or directly by harnessing photosynthetic organisms such as algae. This process is less than 1% efficient at converting sunlight to stored chemical energy. Instead, Electrofuels approaches will use organisms able to extract energy from other sources, such as solar-derived electricity or hydrogen or earth-abundant metal ions. Theoretically, such an approach could be more than 10 times more efficient than current biomass approaches. “ …
Via Department of Energy: Transformational Energy Research Projects.
Sampling of organizations and their electrofuel research topics:
- University of Massachusetts Amherst: Electrofuels via Direct Electron Transfer from Electrodes to Microbes
- Pennsylvania State University: Development of Rhodobacter as a Versatile Microbial Platform for Fuels Production
- The Ohio State University: Bioconversion of Carbon Dioxide to Biofuels by Facultatively Autotrophic Hydrogen Bacteria
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Engineering Ralstonia eutropha for Production of Isobutanol (IBT) Motor Fuel from Carbon Dioxide, Hydrogen & Oxygen
- Ginkgo BioWorks: Engineering E. coli as an electrofuels chassis for isooctane production
- Harvard Medical School-Wyss Institute: Engineering a Bacterial Reverse Fuel Cell
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Bioprocess and Microbe Engineering for Total Carbon Utilization in Biofuel Production