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Fuelling the future


Greg Blackman looks at the process of converting biomass into fuel and the role informatics systems are


playing in this area B


iofuels continue to be a source of intense debate among scientists and environmentalists. Producing fuel from plants and other biological materials


reduces reliance on oil and increases energy security. But there are concerns regarding the sustainability of the practice, in that there is a danger of land use starting to shift to growing crops for biofuels rather than for food. And it is still debatable whether carbon emissions from bioethanol production are any lower than those from oil. Nevertheless, mandates in the US and Europe are in place to encourage


8 SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING WORLD


bioethanol production – the EU Renewable Energy Directive has set a target for biofuels to account for 10 per cent of transport fuel by 2020, while the 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act in the US stipulates that 36bn gallons (136bn litres) of renewable fuels should be produced annually by 2022. In the US at least, bioethanol production has seen a boom with more than 200 ethanol plants currently in operation. The US Department of Energy (DOE) has


established three Bioenergy Research Centres (BRCs), one of which is the Great Lakes


Bioenergy Research Center (GLBRC) with headquarters at the University of Wisconsin- Madison. The centre conducts research into developing plant varieties that yield high concentrations of oils or have cell walls that are easier to break down. It also grows plants for biomass that are used in cell wall deconstruction experiments, most of which revolve around breaking down the cell wall with an alkaline pre-treatment, and biofuel synthesis fermentations. Around 40 individual research projects are currently in operation. These three research groups – improved


plants, cell wall deconstruction and biofuel synthesis – run a central LIMS platform from Starlims to track material fl ow, along with some custom systems that are currently being integrated into the core platform. ‘All the samples and the material batches are


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