Harnessing the power of renewable energy sources to develop the fuels of the future - by Brett Israel, UCB Media Relations
UC Berkeley’s Energy Biosciences Institute has entered into a five-year research agreement with Shell International Exploration and Production to fund research that meets the growing demand for energy in ways that are economically, environmentally and socially responsible.
The agreement is to spend up to $25 million over five years on fundamental research in the areas of global energy transition and new energy technology. The agreement will make EBI a global leader in energy technology research to make next-generation fuels a competitive, sustainable alternative to fossil fuels.
“The Shell agreement brings the first of EBI’s new sponsors into the institute and adds a new dimension to the research focus incorporating research in material sciences, electrochemistry, and computational analysis,” said John Coates, director of the EBI and a Berkeley professor of microbiology.
EBI and Shell are now accepting proposals to initially pursue fundamental research in the areas of solar energy transformation, advanced energy storage and novel synthesis routes to create new products, and to leverage new capabilities in computational material science and biosciences and bioengineering.
The collaboration will also focus on creating new energy technology that will enable fuels derived from sustainable sources to be readily available alongside conventional fossil fuels in the market. EBI’s research focus to date has been on enabling feedstock availability — a goal shared with Shell, which currently holds 50 percent equity in Raízen, the world´s largest producer of one of the lowest-CO2 biofuels available today.
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news.berkeley.edu/2017/03/15/energy-biosciences-institute-shell-partnership