The Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) – the main UK funding agency for the biosciences – has announced the country’s biggest ever single public investment in bioenergy research.

The £27m BBSRC Sustainable Bioenergy Centre (BSBEC) has been launched to provide the science to underpin and develop the important and emerging UK sustainable bioenergy sector – and to replace the gasoline in cars with fuels derived from plants.

Sustainable bioenergy offers the potential to provide a significant source of clean, low-carbon and secure energy, and to generate thousands of new ‘green collar’ jobs. It uses non-food crops, such as willow, industrial and agricultural waste products and inedible parts of crops, such as straw, and so does not take products out of the food chain.

The BBSRC Sustainable Bioenergy Centre is focused on six research hubs of academic and industrial partners, based at each of the Universities of Cambridge, Dundee and York and Rothamsted Research, and two at the University of Nottingham. Another seven universities and institutes are involved, and 15 industrial partners across the hubs are contributing around £7m of the funding.

The Centre’s research activities will encompass many different stages of bioenergy production, from widening the range of materials that can be the starting point for bioenergy, to improving the crops used by making them grow more efficiently, to changing plant cell walls. The Centre will also analyze the complete economic and environmental life-cycle of potential sources of bioenergy.

This means the researchers will be working to make sustainable bioenergy a practical solution, by improving the yield and quality of non-food biomass and the processes used to convert this into biofuels. They will also ensure that the whole system is economically and socially viable.