Bioenergy News
Explore our archive of Bioenergy news stories.
Dec. 13, 2016
Maria Ghirardi, a scientist at the Energy Department’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), has been named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). AAAS cited Ghirardi for "distinguished contributions to our understanding of photobiological hydrogen production in photosynthetic organisms."
Nov. 15, 2016
Zia Abdullah joined the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) October 31 as laboratory program manager for NREL’s Bioenergy Technologies Office (BETO) program. Abdullah is an engineer with extensive experience and accomplishments in thermochemically and biochemically converting biomass to fuels and chemicals.
Oct. 28, 2016
Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) made the surprise discovery that a metabolic pathway to take up CO2 exists and functions in a microorganism capable of breaking down and fermenting cellulosic biomass to produce biofuels including hydrogen and hydrocarbons.
Oct. 19, 2016
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory, in collaboration with partners, recently built a unique pilot-scale facility that can co-produce biomass-derived fuel intermediates with existing petroleum refinery infrastructure. The plant combines biomass pyrolysis with fluid catalytic cracking to demonstrate the potential to co-process biomass-derived streams with petroleum at an industrially relevant pilot scale.
July 20, 2016
The National Bioenergy Center at NREL, with its extensive bioenergy research expertise and capabilities, is working to reduce costs and overcome technical barriers—an effort that will bring more bio-derived fuels and chemicals into the marketplace. A recent and significant step toward that goal is the retrofitting of a reactor system in NREL's Thermochemical Process Development Unit (TCPDU): the recirculating regenerating riser reactor or "R-Cubed."
June 24, 2016
Dr. Mark Davis is the new director of the Biosciences Center at the Energy Department’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).
May 24, 2016
NREL’s state-of-the-art bioenergy research has once again reached award-winning levels. Each year NREL recognizes the professionals behind the lab’s greatest innovations and breakthrough technologies from the past year during its Innovation and Technology Transfer Awards ceremony. Among this year's recipients were many talented staff from the National Bioenergy Center and NREL’s Biosciences Center who were recognized for exceptional work in promoting the transfer of NREL-developed technologies into the private sector and partnering successes.
March 18, 2016
The biological production of fuels and chemicals from methane represents a means of decreasing greenhouse gas emissions and, at the same time, utilizing an abundant-yet-underutilized, high-energy gas, making the process the subject of a promising new NREL study, published in Nature's Scientific Reports.
Feb. 9, 2016
A new biorefinery process developed by scientists at the Energy Department’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has proven to be significantly more effective at producing ethanol from algae than previous research.
Feb. 5, 2016
Researchers at the Energy Department’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and the BioEnergy Science Center (BESC) say better understanding of a bacterium could lead to cheaper production of cellulosic ethanol and other advanced biofuels.
