Corinne Scown
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cdscown.bsky.social
Corinne Scown
@cdscown.bsky.social
330 followers 530 following 180 posts
Senior scientist working on bioenergy 🌱 & circular plastics ♻️ LCA/TEA | Mom of 2, Opinions=own (she/her)
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We have a team of rising stars at @berkeleylab.lbl.gov who are doing incredible work in critical materials & supply chain research. Keep an eye out for more from this team. Here are just a few recent papers (including preprints):
Emeryville is so delightful in the fall
AI integration sounds great but how about we fix app interfaces so I don't have to scroll through every single month between now and the day I was born in 1985 just to finish ordering a takeout sandwich?
Ha, I only wish I was this good!
Youngest child working on securing his good standing early in the game.
A little magnitude 3.1 "teaser" this morning before our Great ShakeOut drill at 10:16am!
Got a request for guidance on doing a TEA for something they plan to make via contract manufacturing. I believe the answer is to just....get a quote(?)
We've had a blustery October but yesterday the bay had a kind of glassy look to it. I really never get tired of the views, in part because they're always a little different.
Got vaccinated for flu and COVID at work today and, out of habit, did not actually look at the shots. So it was a delightful surprise to find these sweet Garfield bandaids on both arms hours later.
Heck of an earthquake last night. Short but the shaking was no joke. It woke all of us up. What is it about this time of year?!
Thanks to @berkeleylab.lbl.gov for the commitment to outreach. It is always one of my kids' favorite spots on the Solano Stroll. Educating the next generation of scientists 👩‍🔬🧑‍🔬
Greetings from the Midwest
TEA aficionados twinning in the office
Going all in on the @jbei.lbl.gov colors today
Another @jbei.lbl.gov publication hot off the presses! 7 herbaceous, 9 woody, 4 food processing residues, and 2 blends all decontructed using butylamine. We can hit $1.3 to 6.1/kg sugar now, process intensification needed to hit $0.45–0.79/kg. pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...
Cost of Deconstruction Depots for Diversified, Waste-Based Lignocellulosic Sugars Using Distillable Solvents
Transitioning to a bioeconomy that makes use of low-emission and waste feedstocks requires greater flexibility to accommodate seasonal variations and mitigate long-term storage challenges, such as material loss and fire risk. To achieve this goal, biomass deconstruction technologies must efficiently handle diverse feedstocks. Here, we assess the cost of using butylamine─a distillable solvent─to deconstruct 22 different biomass feedstocks: 7 herbaceous, 9 woody, 4 food processing residues, and 2 blends. Lignocellulosic sugar production costs, based on current empirical data, range from $1.3 to 6.1/kg, suggesting that substantial improvements are required to compete with conventional sugars. The high solvent loading (850 g/kg of whole slurry) is a process bottleneck. Lowering the solvent loading to 59 g/kg of whole slurry, demonstrated in an L-scale reactor using poplar biomass, reduces the minimum sugar selling price by 33%. Solvent loading and recovery, solid loading, sugar yield, enzyme use, and delivered biomass cost all play key roles in reaching sugar production costs of $0.45–0.79/kg. Strategic feedstock blending to maximize carbohydrate content, process optimization to improve conversion efficiency, and the selection of low-cost feedstocks are important to advancing feedstock-flexible biorefineries.
pubs.acs.org
So what does this mean? Well, you can engineer plants to increase the glucan to xylan ratio. You can select feedstocks with a more favorable ratio. And/or you can focus on hosts and other bioprocessing strategies to enable full consumption of both sugars in less time.
How much xylan vs. glucan is in your original feedstock REALLY matters. Capital-constrained biorefineries operating with shorter residence times can justify paying up to 1.5X to 2X the price for feedstocks with very high glucan to xylan ratios.
My fabulous postdoc, Jaya, led a new analysis in which we used empirical data to figure out how the glucose-to-xylose ratio in 🌱 feedstocks impacts likely residence times and costs. We looked at ethanol (anaerobically produced) and bisabolene (aerobically produced).
Using lignocellulosic biomass for biomanufacturing has long been the dream. Low-input grasses, ag residues, you name it. One challenge remains: microbes consume xylose more slowly than glucose in hydrolysates. Our @jbei.lbl.gov team digs into what this means in our new paper doi.org/10.1016/j.bi...
Redirecting
doi.org
As my darling son snuggled up to read about dinosaurs, something fell out of his hair and on to my sleeve...to whom it may concern, here is why I am now behind on getting things done (except laundry, which I am now VERY much on top of)
In light of news that they might get their budget cut, I just want to share how absolutely amazing the CSB’s investigations and videos for the public are. I used them for teaching. It always made me proud that our government supports stuff like this: youtube.com/@uscsb?si=lX...
USCSB
The CSB is an independent federal agency charged with investigating incidents and hazards that result, or may result, in the catastrophic release of extremely hazardous substances. The agency’s core m...
youtube.com
The potential for cost-competitive lithium extraction from clay relative to brines and hard rock ores: t.co/LzkgOZZjO9
U.S. battery material supply chains and recycling costs: t.co/SFJrqGnTTL
Gallium production costs & recovery/recycling potential in North America: t.co/yYG9bmiRoN