CIRCE: Circularizing Industries by Raising Carbon Efficiency

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Program:
ECOSynBio
Award:
$2,985,025
Location:
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Status:
CANCELLED
Project Term:
09/01/2021 - 07/31/2022
Website:

Technology Description:

The Harvard University team will draw from efficient infrastructures for cheap sugar supply, maturing gas fermentation technology, and sophisticated strategies to engineer fatty acid metabolism. Current bioproduction platforms are limited regarding to carbon efficiency, product versatility or productivity. These platforms have left legacies that will aid Harvard in developing the next generation of carbon-efficient bioproduction, however. It will leverage these to develop a road map for transitioning to a carbon-efficient, highly productive bioeconomy for energy-rich long-chain carbon chemicals with applications in a vast array of industries including fuels, materials, and chemicals.

Potential Impact:

The application of biology to sustainable uses of waste carbon resources for the generation of energy, intermediates, and final products---i.e., supplanting the “bioeconomy”—provides economic, environmental, social, and national security benefits and offers a promising means of carbon management.

Security:

If successful, the new technologies are expected to catalyze new conversion platforms for biofuels and other high-volume bioproducts that are capable of promoting U.S. energy security by increasing recoverable product from the same mass of feedstock through the avoidance of wasting carbon in the form of CO2.

Environment:

This program funds cutting-edge technologies to de-risk the engineering of carbon optimized bioconversion pathways capable of generating valuable bioproducts such as sustainable aviation fuel without emission of CO2 as a waste product.

Economy:

The technologies funded by this program can increase the potential bioproduct output by more than 40% without requiring another square inch of land or pound of feedstock, while catalyzing the next generation of carbon optimized bio-based manufacturing.

Contact

ARPA-E Program Director:
Dr. David Babson
Project Contact:
Prof. Pam Silver
Press and General Inquiries Email:
ARPA-E-Comms@hq.doe.gov
Project Contact Email:
pamela_silver@hms.harvard.edu

Related Projects

• Circe Bioscience - Circularizing Industries by Raising Carbon Efficiency
• Harvard University - CIRCE: Circularizing Industries by Raising Carbon Efficiency
• Invizyne Technologies - Carbon Negative Chemical with Synthetic Biochemistry
• LanzaTech - Carbon-Negative Chemical Production Platform
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) - Zero-Carbon Biofuels: An Optimized Two-Stage System for High Productivity Conversion of CO2 to Liquid Fuels
• National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) - Formate as an Energy Source to Allow Sugar Fermentation with No Net CO2 Generation: Integration of Electrochemistry with Fermentation
• Stanford University - Disruptive Technology for Carbon Negative Commodity Biochemicals
• The Ohio State University - A Novel Integrated Fermentation Process with Engineered Microbial Consortia for Butanol Production from Lignocellulose Sugars without CO2 Emission
• University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) - A Microbial Consortium Enabling Complete Feedstock Conversion
• University of California, Irvine (UC Irvine) - Carbon-Efficient Conversion of Carboxylic Acids to Fuels and Chemicals
• University of Delaware (UD) - Bioenergy Production Based on an Engineered Mixotrophic Consortium for Enhanced CO2 Fixation
• University of Minnesota (UMN) - Cell-free Bioelectrocatalytic Platform for Carbon Dioxide Reduction
• University of Washington (UW) - Self-Assembling Cell-Free Systems for Scalable Bioconversion
• University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-Madison) - Acetate as a Platform for Carbon-Negative Production of Renewable Fuels and Chemicals
• ZymoChem - Development of a Bio-electrochemical Hybrid Fermentation Technology for the Carbon Conserving Production of Industrial Chemicals
• ZymoChem - Development of Carbon-Conserving Biosynthetic Systems Co-Utilizing C1 and Biomass Derived Feedstocks

Release Date:
09/10/2020