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Bio4Energy bids its researchers, members of the Industrial Network, Board and Steering Group—as well as all stakeholders and followers—a happy summer; or winter if you are in the Southern Hemisphere.

While many of the Bio4Energy members are officially on summer holidays until mid-August, we can be contacted for urgent matters via This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. throughout.

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The first half of 2020 has been like no other year, with events having to move online and important trips being cancelled. Despite this, the Bio4Energy members have adapted and kept working from their private homes or with safety precautions taken while carrying out essential laboratory duties.


Bio4Energy's management and communications would like to say thank you very much and to keep up the good work!


For now, the Autumn 2020 Bio4Energy Researchers' Meeting is planned to be an on-location event, 13-14 October at Skellefteå, Sweden.

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EwaMellerowicz field Credit E MellerowiczEwa Mellerowicz surveys a hybrid aspen plant at an early stage of field trials in Sweden. Photo by courtesy of Ewa Mellerowicz.Scientists in Bio4Energy and academic colleagues have shown in field trials that aspen trees that were genetically modified (GM) to render more input material for making biofuel from wood than their wildtype counterparts, are robust enough to grow at a real-life plantation. The researchers also found that they could extract more such glucose sugar, more easily, from the GM trees, compared with the wildtype.

This is the first time such results have been obtained outside of a research laboratory—that is outside of a greenhouse—according to research leader This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. of the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) at Umeå, Sweden.

“The glucose yield was 25 to 30 percent higher in the modified trees compared with the wildtype trees. This is a result obtained without pre-treatment so it means that [the modification helped to] decrease the recalcitrance of the wood and made the raw material easier to transform into sugar”, Mellerowicz told Bio4Energy Communications.

Mellerowicz is one of the principal investigators on the research and development platform Bio4Energy Feedstock and has been in charge of verifying laboratory results in experimental plantations, or field trials, since the start in 2014 at Våxtorp, Sweden. The scientists planted and monitored more than 600 GM hybrid aspen trees, but which had to be harvested on the early side because of the impact of severe drought conditions in the summer of 2018, when all of Europe experienced heat waves.

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Bio4Energy's researchers and students met online to share the latest progress by the seven Bio4Energy Research and Development (R&D) Platforms, as the 17 June Spring 2020 Bio4Energy Researchers' Meeting.*

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Until further notice, the Autumn 2020 Bio4Energy Researchers' Meeting will be held 13-14 October, at Skellefteå, Sweden.

*The pictures used are from archives, in memory of the Spring 2019 Bio4Energy Researchers' Meeting. There and then, our students made a large contribution and we want to encourage them to keep up the good work.

Attachments:
Download this file (Biopolymers-and-Biochemical-Conversion-Technologies.pdf)Bio4Energy Biopolymers and Biochemical Conversion Technologies[Leif Jönsson]377 kB
Download this file (Environment-and-Nutrient-Recycling.pdf)Bio4Energy Environment and Nutrient Recycling[Stina Jansson]267 kB
Download this file (Feedstock.pdf)Bio4Energy Feedstock[Totte Niittylä]6443 kB
Download this file (Strategic-Planning.pdf)Strategic Planning[Leif Jönsson]389 kB
Download this file (System-Analysis-and-Bioeconomy.pdf)Bio4Energy System Analysis and Bioeconomy[Robert Lundmark]1377 kB
Download this file (Thermochemical-Conversion-Technologies.pdf)Bio4Energy Thermochemical Conversion Technologies[Markus Broström]304 kB
Download this file (Wood-Pre-processing.pdf)Bio4Energy Wood Pre-processing[Sylvia Larsson]837 kB

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Sylvia Larsson Kumar Das 030620Sylvia Larsson is new coordinator for education in Bio4Energy. Here with co-worker Atanu Kumar Das. Bio4Energy is having to cancel this autumn’s course in the Bio4Energy Graduate School for advanced students. Biorefinery Pilot Research has been hugely popular for its on-location learning about pilot and demonstration facilities along the coast of northern Sweden. However, the risk for spread of the global Coronavirus means the course has been postponed to next year.

“We will be giving the course as soon as things settle down; hopefully already in spring”, said This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., new coordinator for education in Bio4Energy.

Instead an online introduction will be developed so that all PhD students and postdoctoral researchers interested in research and development in the area of wood biorefinery will have the possibility to learn more about the Bio4Energy research environment and the basics of its activities.

“We are going to make something exceptional that will serve as an entry point to the Graduate School”, Larsson said;

“It is about giving all PhD student the possibility to access what we have to offer. It will place the focus content of the hands-on courses in context. It gives students from different universities the possibility to study together. We have a lot of international students”, she explained.

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ShaojunXiong AnnaStrom2020Shaojun Xiong leads a project on developing joint mushroom and biofuel production, funded by the Swedish platforms BioInnovation and Bio4Energy. Photo by Anna Strom©2020. A highly original research project—on developing joint production of edible mushroom and biofuel—is receiving attention as a top-of-the-line innovation effort in Sweden, as part of the country's aim to develop new technologies and processes for a circular bioeconomy.

A Bio4Energy researcher at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences invented the concept, which rests on the idea that both production strands would be more cost effective and environmentally friendly if they were made in synergy.

If this turns out to be the case—if and when the proposed process and the technologies it relies on have been proven—Sweden could become a net producer of edible mushroom and rely less on imports, all the while making cost-competitive ethanol biofuel.

Attachments:
Download this file (Skogsindustrierna magasin FFB_1-2020_Shaojun Xiong.pdf)Hjältar i Skogsindustriernas Magasin 1, 2020[ ]1288 kB

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ChB LJ EW Bio4Energy C MattiasPetterssonBio4Energy's new management team (from left): Christoffer Boman, Leif Jönsson and Elisabeth Wetterlund. Photo by Mattias Pettersson.Bio4Energy has new programme managers. This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. of Umeå University (UmU) will be acting programme managers and This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., Luleå University of Technology (LTU) their deputy.

The appointment comes at a pivotal time, since Bio4Energy is coming up to the close of its second programme period in 2020. Its funder, the Swedish government, is expected to decide this year whether to renew the funding for Sweden’s Strategic Research Environments (SRE), of which Bio4Energy is one.

It will be up to the newly appointed threesome to lead Bio4Energy into the future.

“We hope that wise decisions will be made and that the SRE initiative will be allowed to continue. We will have to await the arrival of political decision to know more about this”, said Jönsson, professor of Chemistry at UmU.

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SRI SDGs 1 400pxThis team of system analysis researchers at Bio4Energy made the IVA 100 List for Sustainable Competitiveness 2020, with their scheme Developing Sustainability Metrics for Innovative Business. From left: Kavitha Shanmugam, Mats Tysklind, Krishna Upadhyayula and Dalia Abdelfattah.Bio4Energy’s work on developing sustainability metrics for innovative business has been acknowledged by the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences (IVA), on its 100 List for Sustainable Competitiveness 2020.

This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and his team at Umeå University (UmU), specialised in system analysis research, developed the sustainability metric scheme to assist investors wanting to take so called game-changing academic innovations to commercialisation and to market roll out.

The scheme entails four steps, in which the system analysis researchers start by examining an innovation’s environmental and competitiveness credentials using life-cycle assessment and cost-benefit analysis and end by offering easy-to-use indicators, based on which investors can make their decision to invest or not.

The IVA 100 List for Sustainable Competitiveness 2020 highlights academic research that “has a bearing on sustainability, in technical or economics sciences, which can create value for business or society in terms of knowledge, processes, products or business development”.

“We published a [scientific article] in 2018 that talks about how to make the sustainable decision-making process easy—or rather the financial decision-making process easy—for investors, venture capitalists and industries, to bring right and sustainable technologies to the market”, said Upadhyayula, who is an assistant professor at UmU.

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StinaJansson June2019Stina Jansson, platform leader at Bio4Energy, at a conference in June 2019.For the first time in Sweden, researchers will test a system designed to remove polluted sediment at the bottom of lakes and waterways of toxic chemicals, developed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) of the U.S. government. The Sorbent Polymer Extraction and Remediation System (SPEARS), has been used with good results in Canada and the U.S.A. and will be tested in Sweden by a research team at Umeå University (UmU) led by This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., according to a UmU press release.

Whereas in the U.S. and Canada the use of SPEARS had been limited to the cleanup of well-known organic environmental toxins such as polycyclic chlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), Jansson said, the Swedish scientists would also attempt to use it to clean up a range of other toxic compounds and metals.

Until their ban in manufacture in the late 1970s, PCB chemicals were widely used and notably in paints and adhesives. Even though their manufacture stopped, said NASA Kennedy Space Center scientist Jackie Quinn, in a promotional video for SPEARS, PCBs are found ubiquitously throughout the globe. Classified as persistent organic pollutants, they are known to induce cancer.

The UmU scientists, however, will test not only whether SPEARS can be made to clean sediments in Sweden of PCBs and PAHs, but also whether it can remove polychlorinated dibenzodioxins and dibenzofurans, as well as metal-based substances or metals such as arsenic, methyl mercury or tributyltin.

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In the Press

Experten förklarar: Så ska grönt flygbränsle framställas i Långsele, SVT Nyheter Västernorrland
Bio4Energy at Umeå University: Nytt sätt att framställa biobaserade produkter, Process Nordic
“Look before you Leap”: European Science Academies Caution against Subsidies for Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage, European Academies’ Science Advisory Council/Cision
Bio4Energy at Luleå University of Technology: Nytt projekt: Forskare och industrin utvecklar alternativa bränslen för flygplan och kraftvärmeverk, Nordiska projekt
Decarbonising poses a formidable challenge, Maritimt Magasin