ARPA-E Announces $106M in Green Energy Projects

Funded through DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), the $106 million is awarded to projects that could produce advanced biofuels more efficiently from renewable energy instead of sunlight; design completely new types of batteries to make electric vehicles more affordable; and remove the carbon pollution from coal-fired power plants in a more cost-effective way.

The grants will go to projects in 17 states. Of the lead recipients, 24 percent are small businesses, 57 percent are educational institutions, 11 percent are national labs, and 8 percent are large corporations. In supporting these teams, ARPA-E seeks to bring America‘s brightest scientists and innovators together from diverse fields to pioneer a secure and prosperous energy future for the nation.

The awards are part of an overall $100 billion investment the Recovery Act is making in creating jobs and driving economic growth through innovation, science and technology.

This second round of ARPA-E-funded research projects focuses on three critical areas:

1.“Electrofuels” – Biofuels from Electricity — Today’s technologies for making biofuels all rely on photosynthesis – either indirectly by converting plants to fuels or directly by harnessing photosynthetic organisms such as algae. This process is less than 1% efficient at converting sunlight to stored chemical energy. Instead, Electrofuels approaches will use organisms able to extract energy from other sources, such as solar-derived electricity or hydrogen or earth-abundant metal ions. Theoretically, such an approach could be more than 10 times more efficient than current biomass approaches.

Harvard Medical School (Boston, MA) – Engineering a Bacterial Reverse Fuel Cell
This project would develop a bacterium to use electricity (which could come from renewable sources like solar or wind) to convert carbon dioxide into gasoline