Bioenergy Program
INL’s Bioenergy Program funded by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy's Biomass Program, embraces the “Whole Crop Utilization” concept — using the entire crop, including the grain and traditionally discarded plant biomass — to produce food, feed, fiber, and energy.
Program Goal
The goal of INL’s program is to overcome key technical barriers facing the U.S. bioenergy industry — by systematically researching, characterizing, modeling, demonstrating and harnessing the physical and chemical characteristics of the nation’s diverse agricultural residues — to more cost-effectively produce biofuels and other value-added products. The result of this research will be that, by 2010, the costs associated with producing 300 million tons of cellulosic feedstock on an annual basis — will be reduced by up to 50 percent less than what the costs were in 2002 when target baseline costs were formally established. And in a broader sense, the success of this effort will have a direct and positive impact on the Department of Energy transportation fuel goals and the nation’s energy needs.
Resources
Expertise from the Laboratory’s Biofuels and Renewable Energy Technologies and Biological Systems Departments and are used to leverage key multidisciplinary capabilities and advanced systems and technologies with key agricultural and industrial partners. With this foundation, INL effectively addresses feedstock harvesting, fractionation and separation, preprocessing, storage, pretreatment and transportation systems.
Research Laboratories and Capabilities
Four major INL research laboratories are employed to research, develop and demonstrate the systems and technologies needed to meet DOE’s program requirements. They are the Biomaterials Deconstruction and Composition, Computational Engineering and Simulation, Post-Harvest Physiology and Storage, and the Feedstock Assembly and Preprocessing Laboratories. Listed together, their research functions are to:
- identify sufficient, sustainable agricultural residue supplies
- document and update feedstock resource data for all significant agricultural residue resources, and provide access to the national feedstock database via the Internet
- develop technologies and methods to harvest and collect sufficient quantities of agricultural residues on an annual basis
- develop and demonstrate innovative feedstock storage methods
- demonstrate feedstock transportation cost reductions
- demonstrate preprocessing technologies that produce agricultural residue resources with bulk, flowable properties
- develop and validate optimum process and cost models for sustainable feedstock supply systems, and
- show that agricultural residue feedstocks could be supplied to biorefineries within target cost ranges.
- Contact:
- Reuel Smith, (208) 526-3733, Send E-mail