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New Funding Advances Carbon Accounting Associated with Sustainable Biofuels2 min read

by Christina Procopiou on January 30, 2020

Climate and Ecosystem Sciences Division Energy Geosciences Division

Innovators in the Climate and Ecosystem Sciences Division have received funding for new projects that explore the impact of greenhouse gas emissions on biofuel feedstock production. Two projects are supported by grants from the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) program.

Sebastien Biraud - portraitSebastien Biraud is a Co-Investigator of a newly funded ARPA-E project named “Rice ’N Grits.” Michael R. Schuppenhauer from Arva Intelligence Corp. (Park City, UT) is the Project Investigator. This project will likely start this spring and will last three years. It will establish five validation sites where dedicated energy crops (corn) and crop residues (straw) are used for the production of domestic, sustainable, carbon-negative biofuels (i.e. ethanol and biogas).

Digestate from the production of biogas will be returned to fields to replace fertilizer, generating a circular biofuel economy. The researchers will measure carbon and nitrogen fluxes at each site using state-of-the-art high-frequency commercial-scale monitoring towers to assess CO2, CH4, and N2O emissions at sub-second resolution throughout the year, including during post-harvest periods. All farm equipment is highly instrumented, and will measure fuel and electricity use, and fertilizer applied, in addition to crop yield and management practices. Weather, soil, and plant composition will be monitored for nutrient and carbon fluxes. Soil samples will be gathered for DNA and RNA sequencing to monitor and identify biological carbon and nitrogen cycles of the microbiome.

From this data, the team will conduct techno-economic and life-cycle analyses of the relationship between biofuels and the environment. A generative model for biofuel yield will be constructed accounting for carbon and nitrogen cycles and the soil microbial communities and plant metabolic processes that drive terrestrial carbon sequestration, and carbon and nitrogen emissions. Researchers will use this model to optimize productivity towards carbon neutrality/negativity and increased farmer income.

Under another ARPA-E grant, Yuxin Wu will co-lead a team in developing advanced machine learning tools for cross-scale quantification of carbon intensity (CI) during biofuel feedstock production. Berkeley Lab will act as the integrator across all SMARTFARM teams to analyze complex, multi-physics, and multi-scale datasets, and develop scaling approaches across the variety of CI monitoring fields.

The ARPA-E SMARTFARM (Systems for Monitoring and Analytics for Renewable Transportation Fuel from Agricultural Resources and Management) program is based on the belief that biofuels have the potential to be a carbon-negative source of energy. The DOE anticipates that technical developments resulting from the program will simultaneously promote greater profitability for farmers and greater environmental sustainability for our planet.

 

 

 

An additional grant was awarded to Xiaoqin Wu by the Department of Defense Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program (SERDP). This one-year project is expected to help fill data gaps regarding environmental toxicity of new firefighting foam candidates, which are thought to be less toxic than traditional firefighting foams containing notorious fluorosurfactants. Outcomes of this research will assist the Department of Defense in the final selection of new firefighting foams and mitigate potential exposures and future environmental cleanup.

 

 

 

News & Events

Study Sheds Light on Microbial Communities in Earth’s Subsurface2 min read

August 16, 2023

  From the tops of tree canopies to the bottom of groundwater reservoirs, a vast amount of living organisms interact with nonliving components such as rock, water, and soil to shape this area of Earth known as the “critical zone.” Over half of Earth’s microbes are located in the subsurface critical zone, which ranges from…

Carl Steefel Honored in Goldschmidt Session on Reactive Transport2 min read

August 2, 2023

The contributions of Carl Steefel to the reactive transport modeling scientific community were recognized in a session held in his honor at the recent Goldschmidt 2023 conference (Lyon, France). Goldschmidt is the foremost annual, international conference on geochemistry and related subjects, organized by the European Association of Geochemistry and the Geochemical Society. The session was…

DOE Funds Projects to Advance Forest Carbon Dioxide Removal Efforts and Agricultural Soil Carbon Conservation4 min read

August 1, 2023

The DOE Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management (FECM) and Office of Technology Transitions (OTT) recently announced $5 million in funding for four projects–two from Berkeley Lab with EESA leadership. The projects selected offer “promising solutions” to the nation’s climate change challenges by helping to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and will “accelerate their deployment…

Quantifying the strength of the land carbon sink3 min read

July 26, 2023

This article first appeared at nature.berkeley.edu/news. The world’s forests, grasslands, and other terrestrial ecosystems have played a substantial role in offsetting human carbon emissions—a capability that UC Berkeley researchers say would be threatened by continued global change. The assessment, published today as a new review paper in Nature Reviews Earth & Environment, presents a comprehensive analysis of…

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