Sustainable Field-to-Product Optimization
Great Lakes Bioenergy scientist Christos Maravelias sketches out a potential field-to-product pipeline. Maravelias and collaborators are focused on integrating and optimizing every phase of this pipeline, including crop production, biomass deconstruction, and conversion into products.
Understanding and optimizing the field-to-product pipeline
The field-to-product pipeline for biofuels and bioproducts consists of several interdependent phases, including crop production, biomass deconstruction, and conversion into products. At Great Lakes Bioenergy, our multi-disciplinary research projects are focused on improving these individual steps as well as on integrating them into an optimized field-to-product pipeline. Research in field-to-product integration includes:
- Creating novel and robust plant, landscape, and biorefinery models to predict the sustainability, life cycle, and economic outcomes of alternative field-to-product pipelines.
- Understanding how the performance of conversion microbes is impacted by seasonal or environmental changes in bioenergy crops.
- Integrating economic, environmental, and sustainability attributes of feedstocks, products, and land use to predict successful biorefinery configurations at local to regional scales.
- Using information about environmental impacts on feedstocks, plant microbiomes, and conversion microbes to engineer improved bioenergy crops and specialty biofuel microbes.
- Equipping bioenergy crops and microbes with improved metabolic pathways for producing terpenes and converting lignin into bioproducts.