Annually, plant biomass captures an energy equivalent to about 8 times the total energy in all forms used by humankind (oil, coal, natural gas, wind, hydro, etc). Therefore, there is ample stored solar energy in biomass to meet a very large fraction of our total energy needs. Literally mountains of waste and residual biomass exist, for instance as crop processing residues. We could also grow much more biomass for conversion to fuels and chemicals, if there were a market for this additional biomass.

Another key truth that makes our mission possible is that biomass costs much less than petroleum on both a cost per ton and a cost per BTU or kcal of energy content. If this biomass energy content can be efficiently converted to fuels, particularly liquid fuels replacing petroleum products, there is no raw material cost impediment to our mission. Thus biomass is both abundant and inexpensive enough to provide a significant alternative to petroleum as a raw material.

However, while biomass raw materials are cheap, biomass processing to fuels, chemicals and other products is generally not inexpensive enough to overcome the built in advantages of low cost petroleum processing. If we can develop sufficiently inexpensive processing technology to complement the low cost of plant biomass, there is every reason to believe that we can displace large amounts of petroleum derived fuels and chemicals with plant derived fuels and chemicals. The BCRL focuses on developing inexpensive processing technology to convert renewable plant biomass to fuels and chemicals efficiently and at high yield. This is how we will accomplish our mission.

In pursuit of our mission, the BCRL has several interrelated but distinct research areas. Here they are:

Overcoming Biomass Recalcitrance Most biomass energy is “locked up” as inaccessible carbohydrates in the form of cellulose and hemicellulose. Fermentation of these carbohydrates could generate significant quantities of ethanol, a versatile liquid fuel that fits well with our existing vehicle fleet and fuel distribution infrastructure. That is, cellulose and hemicellulose could do this if they were not so difficult to convert to fermentable sugars. If we are to unlock the potential of biomass replace fossil fuels, particularly as sources of liquid transportation fuels, we must overcome this problem, frequently described as biomass “recalcitrance”.

Biomass materials are solids, and there are obvious difficulties associated with using these materials as direct replacements for liquid transportation fuels. As this picture illustrates, it is difficult to fuel your car directly on biomass. The BCRL seeks to overcome the recalcitrance of biomass and convert biomass to liquid fuel products using ammonia to increase the reactivity of cellulose and hemicellulose. This process, called ammonia fiber explosion or AFEX, is followed by biological conversion using enzymes, microbes or other approaches to produce liquid fuels and chemicals.

Coproducing Food and Fuel A frequent concern about biomass fuels is that they might reduce food supplies. We believe the opposite is true—we believe the evidence is that large scale conversion of lignocellulosic biomass to fuels and chemicals will make human food and animal feed both cheaper and more abundant as foods/feeds are coproduced with fuels and chemicals from plant biomass. For example, much plant biomass also contains protein, a valuable animal feed/human food. Our studies show that we can simultaneously reduce the amount of land required to generate large amounts of fuel from biomass and improve the overall process economics by recovering protein within an overall system producing fuels and chemicals from biomass.  For more details, see NRDC's "Growing Energy" report in the "Publications" section..

Biorefinery Approach Ultimately, plant material will be converted to fuels, chemicals, feeds and foods in large, integrated processing systems called “biorefineries”. These biorefineries will be intimately linked with the crop production systems supplying the plant raw materials and probably with animal feeding systems using the protein coproducts from the biorefinery. Corn wet mills and corn dry mills, such as this Archer Daniels Midland corn wet mill in Decatur, Illinois, are prototypes of future cellulosic biorefineries. We seek to understand the behavior of these biorefineries within the context of the overall systems in which they will operate, particularly the planetary cycles of carbon and nitrogen in which these human systems are embedded.

Sustainability Analyses The final component of our overall BCRL research program is to understand and improve the environmental performance of integrated biorefining systems involving crop production, crop processing in the biorefinery and associated animal feeding operations. In the past, society has largely built its new industries and then reacted to the environmental problems they have generated. We can do better this time. We use life cycle analysis (LCA) as a tool to model and better understand the environmental performance of integrated biorefining systems. Our objective is to analyze and compare biorefining systems and the products they generate with conventional systems generating similar products. We wish to understand the environmental performance of biorefineries and biobased products and use this understanding to design the overall biorefining systems so that they achieve the best possible environmental performance.

Thank you for taking the time to learn a bit more about the mission of the BCRL. We invite you look more closely at our people and activities. Welcome to our world of serious dreamers.