The University of Nottingham, 24/04/2012
Funding of £10K has been secured by the Universities of Nottingham (UoN) and Birmingham (UoB) from the BBSRC for a joint international workshop on biofuel production in Sao Paulo state, Brazil, facilitated by the Brazilian agencies BioEN and FAPESP and hosted by Universidade de Sao Paulo’s (USP) Centro Paulista de Bioenergia. The funding awarded by the BBSRC will enable early career researchers to attend the workshop to gain invaluable knowledge and experience from one of the planet’s most advanced biofuel producers. The workshop will involve relevant UK academics from the UoN and UoB and academics/scientists from Sao Paulo state universities & private companies in Brazil. Bioenergy is one of FAPESP’s top priorities and expertise within this key area along with proficiencies in existing 1st generation bioethanol production in Sao Paulo state will be invaluable to develop future collaboration between the Brazilian and UK partners. In addition, there is ongoing research within USP, UNESP, Unicamp, Embrapa, CTBE and BioEn amongst others in Brazil, to make 2nd generation biofuels an efficient and effective way to generate transport fuels for both present and future demand. The workshop will be coordinated by an academic team comprising: Dr Marcus Marvin (UoN), Prof. Lynne Macaskie (UoB) and Dr. Glaucia Souza (USP). The Brazilian speakers will be drawn from the leading universities in Sao Paulo state, which are recognised as some of the leaders in bioenergy research globally. In addition to the involvement of leading academic figures in bioenergy research there will be involvement from Brazilian-based companies to help make the workshop industry relevant and to receive important feedback. Companies who will be invited to attend the workshop include: British Gas, Braskem, ETH, CPFL, Petrobras, British Petroleum, COSAN and Raízen. We wish to work collaboratively with leading researchers in Brazil so that at a peer to peer level we can synergistically combine UK expertise with Brazilian expertise to take bioenergy research to new and exciting horizons, accelerating impact delivery to UK Treasury and mitigating tensions between energy security and food security.
The outcomes of the Bioenergy Workshop will include:
• Greater understanding of what each party can bring to the research table and the state-of-art research processes that are available in each institute.
• Strengthened as well as newly formed collaborations in specific key areas.
• New collaborative research ideas and routes to future funding.
