Over the past year a series of critical ICL-GT-ORNL coordination meetings, seminars and white papers have brought together research experts from these three organizations in science, engineering and public policy.  These activities identified the development of the integrated biorefinery as a cornerstone to addressing today’s and tomorrow’s energy challenges.  This roadmap, finalized in 2006, contains a series of comprehensive research and policy plans aimed at increasing the practicality of using biofuels and biomaterials as a supplement to petroleum-based fuels and materials. A condensed version was summarized as a review article, called “The Path Forward for Biofuels and Biomaterials,” which appeared in the January 2006 in the journal Science (Science 311, 484-489 (2006)).  In brief, the authors argued that biomass represents an abundant carbon-neutral renewable resource for the production of bioenergy and bioproducts, and its enhanced use would address several societal needs.   As discussed in this article, systems integration of agro-energy crops and biorefinery manufacturing technologies offers the potential for the development of sustainable biofuels, bioproducts and biopower that will lead to a new manufacturing paradigm. This systems integration of the biorefinery will minimize capital investment costs and maximize its profitability thereby insuring optimal utilization of biomass for biofuels and bioproducts.

The AtlanTICC Alliance B2B3 programme is a multidisciplinary, multi-partner effort  directed at addressing USA and EU mandates for enhanced production of biofuels-bioproducts from biomass with a special emphasis on the production of biofuels from lignocellulosics.  In this manner, the proposed technologies will avoid the ‘food or fuel’ arguments that are currently ongoing with bioethanol from plant starches (i.e., corn, potato, etc.).  This programme involves joint ICL-GT-ORNL research activities that will lead to the development of innovative refining of biomass to biofuels and bioproducts.  The refining of biomass into bioproducts and biofuels is intimately related.  In brief, the chemical and physical separation procedures used to isolated value-added bioproducts from biomass will impact the chemistry of manufacturing biofuels.  Likewise, the generation of biofuels from plant materials in a biorefinery will impact the nature of the chemical components to be used for bioproducts.  Likewise, all processing of biomass to bioproducts and biofuels will yield a process stream that will be intractable and difficult to convert to value-added biomaterials or biofuels. These spent-biomass residues will need to be treated in an environmentally compatible manner and are an ideal candidate for thermochemical conversion to power and syngas. A key component to this effort will be the formation of partnerships with government agencies, industry and commercial leaders for funding research activities that will lead to the practical development of future  biofuels and bioproducts.