WASHINGTON, June 23, 2016 - Finding ways to grow biofuels
faster and more efficiently is key to unlocking the huge potential these
sustainable energy resources have as a low-carbon alternative to fossil fuels
for transportation, says
the Department of Energy (DOE).
Petroleum remains a major U.S. energy import, and is
responsible for 42 percent of U.S. energy-related carbon dioxide (CO2)
emissions, DOE says, and although use of low-carbon fuels is growing, DOE says
it’s not growing fast enough.
Enter DOE’s Advanced
Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) Transportation Energy
Resources from Renewable Agriculture (TERRA) program.
The main goal of the TERRA program is to develop tools that can
significantly improve the productivity and efficiency of biofuel crops.
Specifically, says DOE, innovations developed in the program are aimed at
facilitating the improvement of energy sorghum by enabling breeders to evaluate
and identify the most promising plants, capture better information about the
plants as they grow– and then use this information to select the best genes to
propagate into new varieties.
TERRA’s robotics technologies could soon make this kind of
research faster, better and cheaper, says DOE.
A central feature of the TERRA robotics program is its enormous
“field Scanalyzer,” the largest sensory robot in the world, installed at the Maricopa Agricultural Center in
Maricopa, Arizona. The sensing system moves along a gantry, scanning sorghum
crops in an area the size of a football field. The system’s sensor pack
measures the growth and development of energy sorghum with unprecedented
resolution, speed and accuracy, says DOE.
TERRA’s robotics platform also includes a sophisticated
aerial sensing system. The unmanned aircraft system (UAS), or drone, can survey
a field, sensing for various plant and environmental characteristics from the
air. By using a UAS, fields can be assessed without interfering with the
plants.
Researchers have also developed small land-based robots that
can similarly scan a field of sorghum and identify the most resilient plants.
If successful, says DOE, innovations developed in the TERRA
program will accelerate the annual yield gains of traditional plant breeding
and facilitate the development of renewable, sustainable and affordable biofuel
feedstocks, leading to increased production of domestic biofuels and stimulating
the global bioeconomy. Increasing the domestic supply of renewable liquid
transportation fuels will also reduce foreign energy dependence, boosting
energy security, says DOE, while reducing CO2 emissions from the
transportation sector.
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