Researchers at Edenspace, located in Junction City, aim to make an important contribution to America’s search for a better fuel with support from K-State and grants from the Federal Government.
    According to the United States Department of Agriculture’s Web site, Edenspace was awarded grant money totaling $1,926,900 in 2006 from the institution for “the development of commercial corn hybrids engineered for enhanced, low cost conversion ... to ethanol.”
    This grant was part of a larger sum, $17.5 million, “to help break our nation’s addiction to oil,” according to the USDA’s Web site.
    In June, the company received a follow-up grant to continue support for Edenspace development, according to the company’s Web site.
    “Edenspace is working to transform plant biomass to produce bioengineered plants,” said Daisey Corredor, Edenspace biomass process engineer.
    “These bioengineered plants can reduce the cost of producing bio-fuels,” she said. “The plants contain endo-enzymes (or plant produced enzymes) to reduce the energy used to produce bio-fuel.”
    The company is currently working with the biology, agriculture and the grain sciences departments.
    Gary Clark, the department head of the biological and agricultural engineering department, and two professors, Wang Donghui and Wenqiao Yuan, are working on bio-fuel technology.
    Donghui is working with Edenspace to create a better fermentaion process in bio-fuel crops, while Yuan is working on producing oil refining algae, “that use the sun’s energy to create oil that is built up in the creatures’ bodies.
    Then once it is time to harvest the algae, the scientist squeezes the oil out of the algae, “ Clark said.
    Work is underway to create a more efficient refining process in K-State’s Grain Science Department.
    Professor Susan Sun specializes in bio-materials and directs the bio-materials and technology lab.
    She explained the process of creating ethanol as breaking down the starch found in corn into sugar, and then using the sugar as substrates for ethanol fermentation.
    Currently, the Nio-Material Lab were Sun works is researching the biomass conversion into chemicals and fuels, according to the Department of Grain Sciences’ Web site.
    The goal of the research concerning bio-fuels is “to develop pretreatment methods to increase the bioconversion rate of biomass and to increase bioconversion rate of biomass, especially of cellulose and semi-cellulose. “
     A 2007 British Petroleum Statistical Review of World Energy reports “oil and gas reserves were largely unchanged in the year with the reserves-to-production ratio remaining above 40 years and 60 years for gas.”
    Bio-energy fuels currently only supply 3.83 percent of the United States energy demand, according to the Department of Energy’s Information Administration, while according to the DOE Web site, fossil fuels supply 85 percent of energy consumed in the United States.

Comments

1 comments

Craig

Wed Nov 19 2008 17:57

cool picture and nice article on bio-fuels
Looks like the gold of the future
Science will find the way,they always do
bio-fuels are here to stay, so Edenspace keep up the good work

Add comment


I am not posting spam. I understand posting spam or other comments that are unrelated to this article will cause my comment to be flagged for deletion and possibly cause my IP address to be permanently banned from this server.

Enter the characters in the image above:

log out