Holiday Greetings from Bio4Energy
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- Written by Anna Strom
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Unique multi-institute research to harness untapped reservoir of plant genes for bioenergy, Science Magazine
Economist Robert Lundmark will be heading the R&D platform Bio4Energy System Analysis and Bioeconomy. Photo by courtesy of the Luleå University of Technology.The research and development platform Bio4Energy System Analysis and Bioeconomy has a new leader.
In so doing, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., professor of Economics at the Luleå University of Technology, is taking over the reins of an all-important entity in Bio4Energy—made up of 30 researchers at three universities—whose members have the responsibility to assess whether the R&D carried out by the rest of the research environment are economically, environmentally and socially sustainable.
“You could say that our role is to highlight results from the other Bio4Energy platforms [that develop biorefinery technologies] and put them in a system’s context. Conversely, we put research questions and are able to suggest avenues of research for the other platforms. It is give and take”, Lundmark said.
Unlike his colleague and predecessor, LTU professor This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., Lundmark is an economist, but with a focus on natural resources.
“My focal area is the interface between forest and energy issues, assessing the cost of various uses of forest raw materials and bioenergy”.
Having clinched his PhD at LTU in northern Sweden, Lundmark went onto undertake postdoctoral studies at the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis in Austria. Northern Sweden wanted him back, however. Lundmark became senior lecturer at the university from which he had graduated, promoted in 2011 to be a professor.
He has been part of Bio4Energy from the start in 2010, and was a member of the previous Process Integration Platform, for the first five years.This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., on the same R&D platform but at Umeå University, will second him and be a coordinator for platform researchers based at Umeå.
Read more: New Leader for Bio4Energy System Analysis & Bioeconomy
Bio4Energy was at BioBase 2019, a conference at Piteå, Sweden designed to show the country's progress in the transition towards a bioeconomy and challenges that lie ahead. The 250 attendees were a variety of stakeholders to the bioenergy and biorefinery sector in Sweden and about 10 other countries. Bio4Energy had its own session on Tailored Trees, Improved Growth and New Products – Towards a Bioeconomy.
“As Bio4Energy we contributed by showing how the cooperation between our universities and institutes can contribute to strengthen the development of a bio-based economy. Our work covers the entire [biorefinery] value chain”, said This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.who coordinated Bio4Energy’s presence at the event.
“We were able to show that we have developed processes and built networks that make us well placed to go into the future. The products in our product portfolio are such that industry and society want”, according to Rova, who is Bio4Energy deputy programme manager and a professor at the Luleå University of Technology.
Read more: Sweden's Progress Towards Bioeconomy Showcased at Conference
This month about 45 Bio4Energy scientists and student researchers met at Skellefteå, Sweden, to hear about newly granted, multiannual, beyond state-of-the art projects designed to:
- Grow trees whose wood more easily renders its cellulose, in view of making biofuel or other bio-based products;
- Extract specialty chemicals from bark from connifers;
- Design biochars for specific uses, for instance as absorbent of toxic substances from waste water and to;
- Examine the gas phase of thermal conversion of biomass to ascertain whether phosphorous may be captured and reused.
 Cheaper methanol production with alkali impregnation and novel syngas cleaning | [Xiaoyan Ji, Bio4Energy System Analysis and Bioeconomy] | 744 kB |
| Bio-based carbon nanofibres likely cheaper | [Jiayuan Wei, Bio4Energy Biopolymers and Biochemical Conversion Technologies] | 1811 kB |
| Bio4Energy partner in iniative to green airline fuel | [Leif Jönsson, Bio4Energy Biopolymers and Biochemical Conversion Technologies] | 131 kB |
| Ionic liquids could replace expensive gas cleaning process | [Fredrik Weiland, Bio4Energy Thermochemical Conversion Technologies] | 1609 kB |
| Is wood ash from biomass combustion always hazardous waste? | [Johan Ingri, Bio4Energy Environment and Nutrient Recycling] | 2136 kB |
Read more: New Strategic Collaboration Projects Unveiled at Mini Conference
For their verification experiments, the Bio4Energy researchers used the Biorefinery Demonstration Plant, at Örnsköldsvik, Sweden. Photo by courtesy of RISE Research Institutes of Sweden.Late 2015, Bio4Energy researchers unveiled a series of articles describing how to raise yields in biofuel making by decreasing the impact of toxic substances generated in the pre-treatment step of biochemical conversion to fuels and chemicals, by using reducing agents. Their work, targeting advanced biofuel production from woody raw materials—sometimes referred to as the biorefinery of the future—has received a great amount of attention from researchers all over the world.
Mid-March this year, the main scientific article in the series, giving a review of research in the area and outlining the new method, had received over 400 citations in other scientific articles written by researchers worldwide. This is more than 20 times the average of articles published in the prestigious Bioresource Technology journal, which carried the review, according to Carlos Martín of Umeå University (UmU). Martín and his co-author This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. are leading figures on the research and development platform Bio4Energy Biopolymers and Biochemical Conversion Technologies.
“Friends and colleagues from all over the world sent their congratulations. Yesterday [25 March] we had received 410 citations. A lot of people have been asking for full-text papers”, a smiling Martín said.
Read more: Method to Raise Yields, Reduce Risk in Biofuel Making, Attracting Global Attention
When the ice will not quite settle on the lake: Season's Greetings from Bio4Energy of Sweden. Photo by Anna Strom© 2018.Bio4Energy wants to thank its researchers, industrial network and stakeholders for a wonderfully productive and exciting year of 2018. In the new year of 2019, we look forward to cooperating even more closely with our strategic partners, among them RISE Processum and Piteå Science Park/Botnia BioIndustries Cluster, and with our newly created Bio4Energy Advisory Board of representatives of industry, research institutes and the Swedish government. The Bio4Energy researchers meet twice a year to share their latest progress. This time the focus was on chemical catalysis and separation technologies, as well as the pre-processing of woody biomass and organic waste intended as raw material for biorefinery processes. They met 16 October at Umeå, Sweden.
Magnus Marklund, CEO at RISE Energy Technology Center, shows a sample of the "green" Black Carbon developed by his team in Bio4Energy and at RISE. Bio4Energy© 2018. Scientists in Bio4Energy have succeeded in making a bio-based equivalent of Carbon Black, one of the most widely used carbon-based industrial chemicals. Carbon Black forms when certain heavy petroleum products are incompletely burned, and there is an established process for making Carbon Black from fossil oil products in the petrochemical industry. The International Agency for Research on Cancer states that this material, which takes the form of a colloid, could “possibly” induce cancer and cause respiratory problems in humans.
To the best of the Bio4Energy scientists' knowledge, the "green" equivalent of Carbon Black they have made is the first ever to be developed from pyrolysis oil.
In fact, the researchers at RISE Energy Technology Centre (RISE ETC), at Piteå, Sweden—part of the platform Bio4Energy Thermochemical Conversion Technologies—used pyrolysis oil made from renewable solid biomass in a high-temperature process developed in-house.
In experiments mimicking the petrochemical industry’s main production process for making Carbon Black, they sprayed pyrolysis oil into a reactor at high temperatures and the resulting material—that is, the “green” Carbon Black—was separated from the gaseous stream at cooling.