The U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) has announced $30 million in funding for six projects as part of one of ARPA-E's newest programs: Transportation Energy Resources from Renewable Agriculture (TERRA). TERRA projects will aim to accelerate energy crop development for the production of renewable transportation fuels from biomass.
ARPA-E says the TERRA program uniquely integrates agriculture, information technology and engineering to address major global challenges in developing crops that are sustainable, affordable and yield abundant plant feedstocks for bioenergy. The program will encourage systems that couple large-scale physical and genetic characterization with advanced algorithms in order to accelerate the year-over-year yield gains of traditional plant breeding and the discovery of crop traits that improve water productivity, nutrient use and our ability to mitigate greenhouse gases.
The TERRA program will provide $30 million to support six project teams in the development of improved varieties of sorghum, a crop used to produce biofuel, by developing improved plant remote sensing, analysis and breeding methods.
View details on TERRA's six projects here.
