Obama Invests $100 Million in Electrofuels, Carbon Capture, EV Batteries

This round of funding opportunities for transformational energy research projects is aimed increasing America's competitiveness in green technology and creating jobs, said Chu. The funds will be made available through the Department of Energy's Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, ARPA-E.

"I am pleased to announce ARPA-E's second funding opportunity because it demonstrates our commitment to lead the next Industrial Revolution in clean energy technologies, creating thousands of new jobs while helping cut carbon pollution," said Secretary Chu. "This solicitation focuses on three cutting-edge technology areas which could have a transformational impact."

One focus will be on electrofuels. These liquid transportation fuels contain no petroleum or biomass but use microorganisms to harness chemical or electrical energy to convert carbon dioxide into liquid fuels.

Heinz Frei, right, a chemist with the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, and postdoctoral fellow Feng Jiao are splitting water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen. (Photo courtesy LLBL)

Projects in this area will directly produce liquid transportation fuels from sunlight and carbon dioxide, typically using photosynthesis. Although current technologies show promise, efficiencies remain low.

ARPA-E requests innovative proposals that utilize metabolic engineering and synthetic biological approaches for the efficient conversion of carbon dioxide to liquid transportation fuels.

ARPA-E seeks the development of organisms capable of extracting energy from hydrogen, from reduced earth-abundant metal ions, or directly from electric current.

Such an approach could be 10 times more efficient than current photosynthetic-biomass approaches to liquid fuel production such as growing corn to make ethanol.

A second focus of this funding round is on advanced technologies to capture the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide emitted by coal-fired power plants.

While coal is a cheap and abundant resource and is used to generate half of the electricity in the United States, the continued reliance upon coal as an energy source could have serious consequences in terms of global warming.

The Energy Department seeks to fund "high risk, high reward" research efforts that will revolutionize technologies that capture carbon dioxide from coal-fired power plants.

The third focus of this round of funding is batteries for electrical energy storage in transportation. ARPA-E seeks to develop a new generation of ultra-high energy density, low-cost battery technologies for long electric range plug-in hybrid electric vehicles and electric vehicles.

The development of high energy, low cost batteries represents the critical barrier to widespread deployment of electric vehicles. If achieved, that would have a profound impact on U.S. oil security, greenhouse gas emissions, and economic growth, the Energy Department said in a statement.

The goals for this program are based on the goals set forth by the United States Automotive Battery Consortium, a public-private collaboration between the U.S. Department of Energy and U.S. automotive companies.

If successful, new battery technologies developed under this program will give electrified light-duty vehicles range, performance, lifetime, and cost required to shift transportation energy from oil to the domestically powered U.S. electric grid.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office will accelerate the examination of certain green technology patent applications, reducing the time it takes to patent these technologies by an average of one year, Commerce Secretary Gary Locke announced as part of this clean energy initiative.

"American competitiveness depends on innovation and innovation depends on creative Americans developing new technology," said Secretary Locke. "By ensuring that many new products will receive patent protection more quickly, we can encourage our brightest innovators to invest needed resources in developing new technologies and help bring those technologies to market more quickly."

Patent applications are normally taken up for examination in the order that they are filed. The average pendency time for applications in green technology areas is approximately 30 months to a first office action and 40 months to a final decision.

Under the pilot program, for the first 3,000 applications related to green technologies in which a proper petition is filed, the agency will examine the applications on an accelerated basis.

Carl Horton, chief intellectual property counsel for General Electric, said, "We hail this initiative as an excellent incentive to fuel further innovation of clean technology and a terrific mechanism to speed the dissemination of these patented technologies throughout the world."

Michael Sykes, an independent inventor who has spent the last 25 years working on technology to make homes more energy efficient, said, "All my inventions relate to energy and energy inventions pay for themselves - so speeding up the process helps me as a businessman, and helps the end user start saving."

ARPA-E's first solicitation, announced earlier this year, was highly competitive and resulted in funding 37 projects aimed at transformational innovations in energy storage, biofuels, carbon capture, renewable power, building efficiency and vehicles.

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