Microvi and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab Awarded $3.5 Million ARPA-E Grant for Gas to Liquid Fuel Conversion
Microvi Biotechnologies announced today that it has received an award from Advanced Research Projects Agency- Energy (ARPA-E), part of the Department of Energy. ARPA-E supports the development of transformational energy technologies with the potential for high impact on society. Microvi will be working with Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (LBNL) and other team members including Kiverdi Inc., Novici Biotech LLC and The Scripps Research Institute, on a project funded by an ARPA-E program called REMOTE (Reducing Emissions using Methanotropic Organisms for Transportation Energy).
REMOTE provides a total of $34 million to find advanced biocatalyst technologies that can convert natural gas to liquid fuel for transportation. There were 15 awardees in the REMOTE category, and the team led by LBNL was awarded $3.5 million.
“We are pleased to have been selected as part of the project team with LBNL on this ARPA-E initiative,” said Dr. Fatemeh Shirazi, CEO of Microvi. “Biological gas to liquid fuels conversion is a potentially transformative area that perfectly matches the expertise that Microvi has to offer.”
“We are looking forward to collaborating with Microvi on this important project,” said Dr. Christer Jansson, Senior Staff Scientist at LBNL and Lead Principal Investigator of the project.
The project will focus on developing a novel enzyme and microbe for direct methane activation and conversion. Microvi’s platform technology, MicroNiche Engineering ™, will be used to enhance the performance of the resulting microbe. If successful, this project will enable low cost, energy-efficient fuel production from natural gas. This project builds on Microvi’s successful work in microenvironmental engineering and is another example of how its technology can be used to lower cost, reduce footprint and increase efficiency.
About Microvi
Microvi is a green technology company based in the San Francisco Bay Area that delivers next-generation biotechnologies for the water, wastewater and renewable chemical industries. Microvi offers commercial technologies around the world to reduce waste, increase productivity and provide disruptive economics across the value chain. Learn more at www.microvi.com.
###
CONTACT:
Microvi Marketing
info@microvi.com
510-344-0668