NARA’s second Cumulative Report is now available online. This report describes research efforts and activities conducted between April 2013 through March 2014.
You can view the NARA Cumulative Report: April 2013-March 2014 here.
Progress reports are sectioned within the Project’s five goals: Sustainable Biojet, Value Lignin Co-Products, Rural Economic Development, Supply Chain Coalitions, and Bioenergy Literacy.
Significant Year-Three findings are summarized in the strategic analysis and executive summary.
Future Direction
With a preferred conversion pathway now selected, Year-Four efforts will focus squarely on commercialization. Efforts to lower feedstock costs will continue by building on successes in lowering grinding energy, improving feedstock densification in chip vans and modeling transportation logistics. NARA’s pretreatment and conversion teams will continue increasing scale of production, focusing strongly on refining processing parameters so that commercial validation of 1000-gallons of jet fuel in Year-Five can be achieved. The techno-economic analysis team will assess the retrofit of existing facilities operated by NARA’s regional partners. NARA’s outreach and education teams will evaluate the entire NARA four-state region for additional retrofit opportunities and evaluate more closely the development of a distributed sugar production model using micronized wood milling.
In addition to the commercialization efforts, models and analyses used to assess the economic, environmental and social sustainability of creating petrochemical substitutes from forest residuals will be further refined. Activities to build bioenergy literacy among students and professionals will continue with improved assessments to measure learning and application success.