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NSF awards $2M to Rice U collaboration to explore direct conversion of CO2 into fuels

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Koch School of Chemical Engineering Practice at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Yuanyue Liu, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. We intend to build an electrochemical modular system as a platform for a continuous conversion process of simulated flue gas to pure liquid fuels.

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Converting Coal Power Plants to Nuclear Gains Steam

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Department of Energy (DOE) released a report suggesting that, in theory, over 300 former and present coal power plants could be converted to nuclear. Such a conversion has never been done, but the report is another sign that the idea is gaining momentum—if with the slow steps of a baby needing decades to learn to walk. “A

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ARPA-E awarding $30M to 12 hybrid solar projects; conversion and storage

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Under the FOCUS program, projects will develop advanced solar converters that turn sunlight into electricity for immediate use, while also producing heat that can be stored at low cost for later use as well as innovative storage systems that accept both heat and electricity from variable solar sources. Earlier post.). Source: ARPA-E.

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Researchers use PEM fuel cell reactor to convert biomass-derived acetone into isopropanol; new biomass to fuels pathway

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A team from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, University of Massachusetts-Amherst and Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology of South Korea has demonstrated the feasibility of using proton-exchange-membrane (PEM) reactors electrocatalytically to reduce biomass-derived oxygenates into renewable fuels and chemicals. Tompsett, G.

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DOE Awarding $4.4M to Six Projects for Carbon Capture and Conversion

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million to six research projects to help find ways of converting CO 2 captured from emissions of power plants and industrial facilities into useful products. The projects are located in North Carolina, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Georgia, and Quebec, Canada (through collaboration with a company based in Lexington, Ky.).

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Tunable high-yield catalytic approach converts pyrolysis oil to bio-hydrocarbon chemical feedstocks including fuel additives

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Pyrolysis bio-oils are produced by the thermal decomposition of biomass by heating in the absence of oxygen at more than 500 °C; fast pyrolysis of biomass is much less expensive than biomass conversion technologies based on gasification or fermentation processes. —Vispute et al.

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Anellotech Bio-TCat hits commercially-targeted yields during 6 months of continuous operations

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Anellotech’s core technology, Thermal Catalytic Biomass Conversion (Bio-TCat) was developed to produce chemicals and fuels from renewable, non-food biomass. Anellotech ’s Bio-TCat technology has achieved commercially-targeted yields in its TCat-8 pilot unit in Silsbee, Texas during six months of continuous process operations.