ASV Enerģētikas aģentūra turpina investēt šķidrās bioenerģijas pētniecības centros

"The U.S. Energy Department on Tuesday announced that it will invest up to $375 million in three new Bioenergy Research Centers that will be located in Oak Ridge, Tennessee; Madison, Wisconsin; and near Berkeley, California.
These centers would develop cellulosic ethanol and other biofuels that will help reduce America's gasoline demand, the agency said in a statement.
The three new research centers in association with universities, national laboratories and private companies will try to develop new ways of turning switchgrass, poplar trees and other plants into biofuel.
Each centre will receive $125 million to research new technologies for the development of cellulosic ethanol and other biofuels over five years. All three Centers will use different plants both for laboratory research and for improving feedstock crops.
"Where energy is concerned, we simply must find ways to do more with less," said Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman. "We can develop fundamentally new sources of energy, but only by inventing radical new technology will we be successful."
US Energy Department’s investment in the three centers comes as part of Bush administration's "Twenty in Ten" initiative, which seeks to make cellulosic ethanol produced from cheaper agricultural and forest wastes and reduce U.S. gasoline consumption by 20 percent within 10 years.
In the United States Ethanol is produced mainly from corn, however, the US Government intends to replace this traditional corn-based with an alternative that uses nonfood sources for energy.
"This research is critical because future biofuels production will require the use of feedstocks more diverse than corn, including cellulosic material like agricultural residues, grasses, poplar trees, inedible plants, and non-edible portions of crops," the DOE said.
Bodman said the new bioenergy research centers would bring together science experts from 18 of the country’s leading universities, seven Energy Department national laboratories, one nonprofit organization and a number of private companies.
The “DOE Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center” will be led by the University of Wisconsin in Madison, Wisconsin, in close collaboration with Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan.
The other two Research Centers, the “DOE BioEnergy Research Center” and the “DOE Joint BioEnergy Institute” will be led by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California, respectively.
The three bioenergy research centers are expected to begin their work in 2008 and be fully operational in 2009."

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