JBEI is headquartered in EmeryStation East, a new state-of-the-art laboratory building in Emeryville, California, centrally situated among JBEI’s six institutional partners. In keeping with its Bay Area heritage and to promote rapid commercialization of its scientific results, JBEI operations are organized along the lines of a biotech company whose goal is to achieve significant scientific progress within the next five years. This organizational structure consists of four divisions: Feedstocks, Deconstruction, Fuels Synthesis and Technologies.
JBEI research is focused on the efficient conversion into fuels of lignocellulosic biomass, the most abundant organic material on the planet. Lignocelluose is a mixture of complex sugars and lignin, a non-carbohydrate polymer that provides strength and structure to plant cell walls. By extracting simple fermentable sugars from lignocellulose and producing biofuels from them, the potential of the most energy-efficient and environmentally sustainable fuel crops can be realized.
It is estimated that each year the surface of the earth receives about 100,000 terawatts of solar energy. Current worldwide human energy consumption is estimated to be running at about 13 terawatts (trillion watts) per year. This means there’s enough power in an hour’s worth of global sunlight to meet an entire year’s worth of human energy needs. A substantial portion of this solar energy is stored within biomass. Harnessing this energy through the production of advanced biofuels, could meet most if not all of the nation’s annual transportation energy needs without producing carbon emissions that contribute to global climate change. That is the JBEI challenge.
