Hanna Breunig began in my group as a Postdoctoral Fellow, and this fall she was promoted to Senior Scientific Engineering Associate. She is clearly one of the Energy Technology Area’s rising stars and we are all excited to see her flourish in her new role. Congrats, Hanna!
Our new paper (Breunig et al. 2017), published in Environmental Science & Technology, focuses on the electricity generation potential from utilizing food waste in California. Our findings reveal that a substantial fraction of food waste can be co-digested at existing wastewater treatment facilities. We also show that the availability of high-moisture residues varies dramatically month-to-month, and because multi-month storage of high-moisture solids is potentially challenging, seasonality is a key factor for determining bioenergy generation potential. It is available as a “Just Accepted” manuscript as of yesterday and can be found here. This work was funded by the California Energy Commission (CEC) Electric Program Investment Charge (EPIC).
Arpad Horvath, Mike Taptich, and I just wrapped up our project on drop-in biofuel production for the California Air Resources Board. Arpad and I visited Sacramento to present our findings just before the holidays. Links to the slides, final report, and abstract can be found here. The video interview can be viewed below:
We have published a new paper in Energy & Environmental Science on an integrated process for producing biofuels using bio-compatible ionic liquid pretreatment and reversible pH-adjustment with CO2.
Paper: http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2016/ee/c6ee00913a
LBNL press release – http://newscenter.lbl.gov/2016/07/21/co2-ionic-liquid-biofuel-pretreatment/
Researchers at JBEI are studying the use of CO2 to streamline the production of biofuel. From left, Feng Xu, Corinne Scown, Tanmoy Dutta, Seema Singh, Jian ‘James’ Sun, Blake Simmons and Murthy Konda. (Credit: Arthur H. Panganiban/JBEI at Berkeley Lab)
My collaborators and I have published two new papers this fall. The first is the result of a partnership between the Energy Biosciences Institute and the University of Bath, entitled “Challenge clusters facing LCA in environmental decision-making—what we can learn from biofuels”. It is available in The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment. The paper is open-access and available for download here. The second paper is the result of work done at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab on spatially-explicit water impacts of carbon capture and sequestration. It is published in Environmental Modeling and Software and available here.
I’m excited to share another paper that combines experimental work on drop-in fuel production from bio-based materials with life-cycle assessment: Upgrading Lignocellulosic Products to Drop-In Biofuels via Dehydrogenative Cross-Coupling and Hydrodeoxygenation Sequence. Sanil Sreekumar is the lead author.
I have posted the pre-publication versions of most of my previous papers on the Publications page of this site. Feel free to download un-typeset copies there or access the final versions on the journals’ websites. If the paper you want is not provided in a free format, please email me to request a copy (cdscown@lbl.gov).
