Circularizing Industries by Raising Carbon Efficiency

Default ARPA-E Project Image

Program:
ECOSynBio
Award:
$2,500,000
Location:
Somerville, Massachusetts
Status:
ACTIVE
Project Term:
09/29/2022 - 09/28/2024
Website:

Critical Need:

To accomplish net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 we need to decarbonize industrial manufacturing and food production. Use of fermentation processes to replace carbon intensive traditional ways to produce fuels, materials and food is vital to that task. Examples of bioprocesses that alleviate emissions are bioethanol production and alternative protein production from plant biomass. However, these bioprocesses are not carbon efficient. Current commercial methods to produce ethanol biofuel from sugar or starches waste more than 30% of the carbon in the feedstock as carbon dioxide (CO2) in the fermentation step alone. This waste limits product yields and squanders valuable feedstock carbon as greenhouse gas CO2. Preventing the loss of carbon as CO2 during bioconversion, or directly incorporating external CO2 as a feedstock into bioconversions, would revolutionize bioprocessing by increasing the product yield per unit of carbon input by more than 50%.

Project Innovation + Advantages:

Circe Bioscience is building a carbon-efficient precision fermentation platform to produce energy-rich long-chain carbon chemicals with applications in several industrial sectors including fuels, materials, and food. The Circe system has a high degree of feedstock flexibility allowing it to take advantage of the legacy bioeconomy for cheap sugar supply and of a growing green energy infrastructure for external reducing equivalents to achieve high carbon efficiency. Circe uses proprietary technology to engineer fatty acid metabolism for production of reduced carbon compounds that can be used as fuel precursors, materials or food ingredients. This allows Circe to build a road map for transitioning to a carbon-efficient bioeconomy and increasing sustainability of currently high emitting industrial sectors.

Potential Impact:

The application of biology to build a carbon-efficient, enhanced bioeconomy by taking advantage of the growing renewable energy infrastructure provides economic, environmental, social, and national security benefits and offers a promising means of carbon management.

Security:

If successful, Circe Bioscience’s technologies are expected to catalyze new conversion platforms for biofuels, materials and food ingredients which promotes U.S. energy and food 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 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, ounce of fresh water or pound of feedstock, while catalyzing the next generation of carbon optimized bio-based manufacturing.

Contact

ARPA-E Program Director:
Dr. Kirk Liu
Project Contact:
Marika Ziesack
Press and General Inquiries Email:
ARPA-E-Comms@hq.doe.gov
Project Contact Email:
marika@circebioscience.com

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:
05/14/2021