Related topics: biofuel · crops · ethanol

How plant biology research could inform COVID-19 treatments

Investigating the building blocks of biology can lead to unexpected outcomes. That's what happened when researchers at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory were exploring plant genetics. Although their ...

Capturing carbon with crops, trees and bioenergy

An integrated approach to land management practices in the U.S. can reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere far more than earlier estimates based on separate approaches, Michigan State University researchers say. Their research ...

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Bioenergy

Bioenergy is renewable energy made available from materials derived from biological sources. Biomass is any organic material which has stored sunlight in the form of chemical energy. As a fuel it may include wood, wood waste, straw, manure, sugarcane, and many other byproducts from a variety of agricultural processes. By 2010, there was 35GW of globally installed bioenergy capacity for electricity generation, of which 7GW was in the US.

In its most narrow sense it is a synonym to biofuel, which is fuel derived from biological sources. In its broader sense it includes biomass, the biological material used as a biofuel, as well as the social, economic, scientific and technical fields associated with using biological sources for energy. This is a common misconception, as bioenergy is the energy extracted from the biomass, as the biomass is the fuel and the bioenergy is the energy contained in the fuel.

There is a slight tendency for the word bioenergy to be favoured in Europe compared with biofuel in North America.[citation needed]

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