BETO is providing $1 million in vouchers to assist five companies advance their energy technologies in Round 2 of the DOE’s Small Business Vouchers Pilot. Of the five companies, three will be collaborating with ABPDU. They are:
- ZymoChem, Berkeley and Emeryville, California (partnership with LBNL): ZymoChem is engineering microbes to eliminate carbon loss during the production of chemicals, such as adipic acid, from renewable feedstocks by designing completely new biosynthetic pathways. ZymoChem will work with the LBNL Advanced Biofuels Process Demonstration Unit (ABPDU) to validate E. coli’s capability to tolerate high product concentrations during fermentation and demonstrate the ability to recover purified products for customers to evaluate.
- HelioBioSys, Woodside, California (partnerships with LBNL and SNL): In order to validate cyanobacteria as a renewable source of sugar for biofuel production, HelioBioSys needs to evaluate growth on a larger scale in outdoor conditions to obtain monomeric sugar types and yields, fermentation suitability, and by-product opportunities. Data generated from this study at the LBNL ABPDU and SNL’s indoor algal testbed facility will improve their existing techno-economic model and improve HelioBioSys’ ability to secure funding for a pilot test facility.
- Mango Materials, Albany, California (partnerships with LBNL and LANL): Mango Materials has a biogas fermentation process to produce sustainable and biodegradable biopolymers. The company is seeking to improve its ability to cost-effectively separate and de-water polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHA) from the fermentation broth and non-PHA cell mass. The goal is to further develop a cost-effective separation process for intracellular products with a path forward to scale-up at the LBNL ABPDU.