Dr. Scott Holub from Weyerhaeuser presented an update on research at the NARA long-term soil productivity site near Springfield OR. This presentation is part of a webinar series provided by the McCall Outdoor Science School and is used to bring NARA …more
NARA researcher Xiao Zhang received a $500,000 five-year Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program award from the National Science Foundation to develop ways to convert lignin into long chained hydrocarbons that could be used for fuel. For more information, read the article posted in the WSU news.
Xiao’s team contributed greatly to NARA’s efforts to determine the variability …more
* Note: This notice appears on the NARA blog due to a request from RSB on 1/28/15 to disseminate this information to a wider audience.
A 60-day public consultation period for revisions to the RSB‘s Principles & Criteria begins today. Comments, questions and suggestions are requested for the following documents:
The USDA-NIFA, through NARA, funds research to determine the environmental impact from a wood-based biofuel and chemical industry. To gauge how this industry would affect greenhouse gas (GHG) levels, a life cycle assessment (LCA) is being developed. In this …more
Researchers at the Argonne National Laboratory have developed a online program (WATER) designed to provide analysis on water demand for use in developing biofuels from multiple feedstocks including forest wood biofuels.
WATER adopts a water footprint methodology and contains extensive climate, land use, water resource, and process water data.
Free access is available here.
In 2014, NARA researchers published 25 papers in peer-reviewed journals. These publications help transfer NARA research to a wide audience. Here is a brief narrative to how these peer-reviewed papers complement NARA’s goals and contribute towards evaluating the use of forest residuals as a feedstock to produce chemical products.
NARA goal 1: …more
The US Navy is testing a 50/50 alcohol-to-jet (ATJ) fuel produced by Gevo Inc. for use with their F/A-18 “Hornet” jets. They recently announced their first successful supersonic flight using Gevo’s ATJ fuel derived from isobutanol.
You can read Gevo’s press release here.
Gevo is an affiliated member of NARA. For NARA, they are adapting their ATJ technology to use the simple sugars contained in forest residuals as a feedstock for …more
Here is a challenging class room assignment: map out where you would process slash piles from forest harvest into valuable …more
Fermentation is a biological process that can convert the simple sugars from wood and other cellulosic-based feedstocks into chemical products and represents a key step in the conversion processes evaluated by NARA to convert wood residuals into biojet fuel. Gevo Inc, a NARA member, relies on specialized yeast to …more
The IDX team at Washington State University has been tasked with evaluating the NARA 4-state region (ID, MT, WA, OR) to determine optimal locations for infrastructure to support a wood residual to biojet fuel and co-product supply chain. In the previous webinar, the region was evaluated based on regional assets leading to 35 potentially viable sites. This webinar will continue the previous work by providing …more