A research team from the University of Western Australia (Perth; www.uwa.edu.au), led by professor Dongke Zhang, has pioneered the application of higher plants for new-generation biofuel production. Metabolic engineering of Arabidopsis thaliana — a small flowering plant native to Europe…
Industrial microbiology continues to hold the promise of producing an increasingly large array of commercially important chemicals because an ever-wider number of useful microbes is being developed and successfully deployed at commercially viable scales. Today, many of these bio-based chemicals…
Harvest Power (Waltham, Mass.; www.harvestpower.com) recently began operation of the first commercial-scale, high-solids anaerobic digester in North America. The facility produces biogas from food waste and yard waste in Richmond, B.C., Canada. “The anaerobic digester employs essentially the same biology…
Short-chain hydrocarbons have been produced for the first time by microbial fermentation by a research team from the Dept. of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST; Daejeon, South Korea, www.kaist.ac.kr), led by…
Daiki Axis Co. (Matsuyama City, Japan; www.daiki-axis.com) has developed a new solid catalyst for biodiesel fuel production under the support of New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO) under the authority of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry…
Last month, Carbo Ceramics Inc. (Houston; www.carboceramics.com) introduced KryptoSphere, an ultra-conductive, high-strength proppant technology designed to maximize and sustain hydrocarbon flow at high closure stresses for the life of the well. Developed in response to a request from a major…
Last month saw the start of a five-year joint research project to extract rubber from dandelion plants to make tires. In collaboration with Continental AG (Hannover, Germany; www.continental-tires.com), the Fraunhofer Institute for Molecular Biology and Applied Ecology (IME; Aachen, Germany;…
The Linde Group (Munich, Germany; www.linde.com) has developed a new storage technology that will enable a much more efficient transport of larger amounts of hydrogen. The new solution works at a higher pressure of 500 bars (7,250 psi) and uses…
An international team of researchers claims to have developed carbon nanotube (CNT) membranes with an ultrahigh specific-adsorption capacity for salt that is two orders of magnitude higher than that found in current activated-carbon-based water-treatment systems. The team includes researchers from…
Last month, the synthesis stage of the bioliq (biomass to liquid Karlsruhe) pilot plant produced gasoline for the first time at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT; Germany; www.kit.edu). The achievement is a milestone in that all stages of the…