Metabolix, a major developer of green and sustainable alternative solutions for chemicals, energy and plastics, has received $6 million worth of funding from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).
The sponsorship comes under the $42 million R&D project fund of Obama government to encourage the development of renewable biofuels and value enriched bio-related products. The grant will be used by Metabolix to continue its investigation into engineered switchgrass, which serves as an ideal substitute to petroleum feedstocks.
For a number of years, Metabolix has been using switchgrass to improve its biomass biorefinery platform. The new funding agreement will enable the company to further improve polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs) expression in switchgrass, enabling co-development of dense biomass and chemicals. The fueling and shipping characteristics of dense biomass will closely resemble coal. In addition, the company will further build and upgrade its selective thermolysis process. The selective thermolysis method uses normal temperature to directly retrieve a new platform chemical, crotonic acid, from PHA comprising switchgrass. The chemical can be quickly altered to several chemical intermediates such as butanol and propylene via easy chemical alteration stages.
Metabolix’ Chief Scientific Officer and Vice President of R&D, Oliver Peoples stated that the DOE grant will enable them to develop a new sustainable bioenergy solution, which can considerably bring down the reliance on foreign oil as well improve America’s economic growth.
Source: http://www.metabolix.com