The US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (ARPA-E) is piloting a crowdsourced energy challenge , focused on ARPA-E’s PETRO (Plants Engineered To Replace Oil) program, which aims to increase the viability of biofuels by investing in research to double the energy-capture-per-unit area from that of corn ethanol. ( Earlier post .) The challenge asks “solvers” to present a detailed description and scientific rationale for a simple, rapid, and minimally invasive method to determine the energy content of plant material. Winners could receive up to $30,000. The goal of the PETRO program is to engineer new crops to produce fuels that can be extracted from the plant itself, in contrast to traditional research in the area that focuses on breeding larger plants. To do this […]