The U.S. Department of Energy on June 24 announced it will award $30 million to 68 projects that aim to accelerate the commercialization of promising energy technologies, including those related to biofuels, bioenergy and bioproducts.

The awards, made under the DOE Office of Technology Transitions’ Technology Commercialization Fund, will help deploy innovative solutions from DOE’s national labs onto the marketplace, helping to create new jobs and businesses while also strengthening U.S. economic competitiveness and achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. The TCF was created b y the Energy Policy Act of 2005 and aims to help catalyze the agency’s research, development, demonstration and deployment efforts into affordable, market-ready energy solutions by strengthening partnerships between DOE’s national labs and American entrepreneurs.

Awards for biofuel, bioenergy and bioproducts projects include:

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

•$1.5 million for a project with Praj industries Inc. focused on high-performance sustainable aviation fuel (SAF).

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

•$250,000 for a project focused on novel biogas reactors for energy recovery at small-scale wastewater treatment facilities.

Los Alamos National Laboratory

•$1.5 million for a project with Oberon Fuels focused on DME as a renewable hydrogen carrier.

National Renewable Energy Laboratory

•$100,000 for a project with Ensyn and Marrone Bio Innovations focused on the production of biobased insecticides from the thermochemical conversion of biomass.  

•$400,000 for a project with Invizyne Technologies focused on reducing protein production costs to enable cell free biocatalysis.  

•$250,000 for a project with Novozymes North America focused on robust carbonic anhydrases for novel biological, sustainable and low-energy CO2 scrubbing process from waste gases.  

A full list of awards is available on the DOE website.