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Replacing fossil fuels with biofuels—fuels produced from renewable organic material—has the potential to reduce some undesirable aspects of fossil fuel production and use, including conventional and greenhouse gas (GHG) pollutant emissions, exhaustible resource depletion, and dependence on unstable foreign suppliers. Demand for biofuels could also increase farm income. On the other hand, because many biofuel feedstocks require land, water, and other resources, research suggests that biofuel production may give rise to several undesirable effects. Potential drawbacks include changes to land use patterns that may increase GHG emissions, pressure on water resources, air and water pollution, and increased food costs. Depending on the feedstock and production process and time horizon of the analysis, biofuels can emit even more GHGs than some fossil fuels on an energy-equivalent basis. Biofuels also tend to require subsidies and other market interventions to compete economically with fossil fuels, which creates deadweight losses in the economy.

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Unlike other renewable energy sources, biomass can be converted directly into liquid fuels, called "biofuels," to help meet transportation fuel needs. The two most common types of biofuels in use today are ethanol and biodiesel, both of which represent the first generation of biofuel technology.

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More than 12 million people around the world worked in renewable energy in 2020, an increase of 500,000 from the year before, even after the significant impacts of the coronavirus pandemic.

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Estimates suggest 200 billion pounds of plastic is produced every year. Due to the technical limitations or inconvenience of recycling, only a fraction of that material resurfaces in new plastic products. It takes no imagination whatsoever to throw away plastic and doom it to the fate of a thousand years in a landfill, but plastic waste doesn't just threaten terra firma.

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Bioplastics — biodegradable plastics made from biological substances rather than petroleum — can be created in a more economical and environmentally friendly way from the byproducts of corn stubble, grasses and mesquite agricultural production, according to a new study by a Texas A&M AgriLife Research scientist.

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Plastic pollution is a recognized global challenge. According to Our World in Data, since 1950, only 9% of the roughly 5.8 billion tons of plastic waste has been recycled. Experts estimate that there will be more plastic than fish by mass in the ocean by 2050.

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WASHINGTON, D.C. – As part of a White House roundtable to launch the Sustainable Aviation Fuels (SAF) Grand Challenge to decarbonize the aviation sector by 2050, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today announced $64.7 million in funding for projects focused on producing cost-effective, low-carbon biofuels. These investments will advance technologies to create replacements for petroleum fuels used in heavy-duty forms of transportation, like airplanes and ships, and accelerate America’s path to a net-zero emissions economy by 2050.

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Sustainable aviation fuel, made from bio-based sources instead of petroleum, plays a key role in reducing our reliance on fossil fuels. But developing sustainable aviation fuel, also known as biojet, is not an easy task.

Researchers need to undergo several processes in order to identify a potential biojet fuel and begin successful production in a pilot facility. Often, this means spending time and money in the lab doing trial-and-error basic research and later scaling up production to make enough fuel for testing

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Techno-economic analysis is the first to model PNNL technology across wastewater facilities

Wastewater—American households produce billions of gallons of it daily, from flushing toilets to cleaning clothes.

But wastewater is not just a waste. The energy, nutrients, and metals contained in the untreated sludge at thousands of the nation’s wastewater resource recovery facilities have the potential to be transformed into a renewable, cost-effective feedstock for liquid transportation biofuels.

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Not all of the challenge of reducing transportation-related greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is found at the end of automobile tailpipes. The aviation sector currently accounts for more than ten percent of U.S. transportation-related GHG emissions. To address this issue, the White House recently announced a Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) Grand Challenge to generate at least 3 billion gallons of SAFs by 2030 and, by 2050, sufficient SAFs to meet 100 percent of U.S. aviation fuel demand, currently projected to be around 35 billion gallons annually. Meanwhile, the International Air Transportation Association (IATA), which represents major global airlines, has committed to net-zero carbon emissions from global air transportation by 2050.

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