﻿Our world is really big—7.8 billion people—and they are always on the move.
Providing these people with enough energy in the form of transportation fuels is an
enormous challenge. Today’s fuels come mostly from fossil sources—petroleum, natural gas,
and coal—but the fuels for tomorrow will come increasingly from renewable sources like biomass,
the largest sustainable source of carbon on the planet
–enough in the United States alone to provide up to 30% of our transportation fuels needs annually.
Enter the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, one of the world’s leaders in the development of
innovative and cost-effective technologies for sustainable mobility.
Here at NREL, scientists and engineers work on a broad portfolio of processes
for converting biomass to transportation fuels such as gasoline, diesel, jet, and synthetic natural gas.
Let’s start with the biochemical platform.
Biomass is comprised of a mix of bio-polymers including cellulose, hemicellulose, and lignin.
These polymers can serve as the source for cellulosic sugars that can be upgraded
to transportation fuels, such as ethanol. Cellulosic ethanol—made from material such
as forest residues and agricultural waste (the 90% of the inedible mass that farmers
typically throw away)—holds great promise for reducing our reliance on foreign oil
and securing our energy independence. Through a multiyear research project
involving private industry, NREL made significant improvements in pretreatment,
enzymatic hydrolysis, and fermentation to help meet the cost goals for biochemical
conversion—proving that cellulosic ethanol can be cost competitive with other transportation fuels.
Scientists also led pilot-scale projects at NREL’s Integrated Biorefinery Research Facility
that enabled private industry to ramp up efforts to commercialize
the production of cellulosic ethanol. And NREL continues to perfect these technologies
with its partners, making the next generation of biofuels more cost-effective and carbon efficient.
A second major focus at NREL is thermochemical conversion. As the name implies, thermochemical
technologies use heat and chemistry—often enabled by inorganic catalysts—to drive the transformation
of biomass into liquid transportation fuels. NREL is taking its expertise in thermochemical
processes to new heights by tackling the challenge to develop sustainable aviation fuels
for an industry that uses nearly 1.7 billion barrels of petroleum-derived jet fuel each year.
NREL researchers are developing
a pathway toward sustainable aviation fuel using an abundant and underutilized feedstock:
food waste, animal waste, and urban sewage sludge. Taking a cue from the typical decay process in
landfills—or cow guts—that turns biomass into methane, NREL, in partnership with Boeing,
Southwest Airlines, Earth Energy Renewables, and World Energy, is engineering catalysts
and processes to better upgrade volatile fatty acids from an anaerobic digester
into jet fuel that is actually carbon negative. NREL’s third major platform for producing biofuels
is algae. This technology uses very different tools, combining agriculture to grow the algae
with thermochemical and biochemical processes to recover intermediates
and produce fuels, as well as final products like chemicals, nutraceuticals, and even food.
In partnership with ExxonMobil, NREL is working to better understand and improve the
processes involved in using algae as a platform technology for making carbon-negative biofuels.
Algae can be cultivated indoors, but to scale it up for biofuels,
the work needs to move outside, where strains are heavily impacted by varying sunlight,
carbon dioxide, and nutrients in the water. Scientists are taking advantage of NREL’s
computer modeling capabilities to understand the complex variables for cultivating algae,
with a goal to optimize the locations and conditions of algae farms.
Working with NREL, engineers and scientists can leverage all the resources the laboratory has to offer
to develop technologies needed to solve industry problems. To find out more about
working with NREL on the energy challenges facing our society and planet, please visit our website.