Below is the text version of the webinar “FY25 FCIC Industry Partnership Call” presented by the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Bioenergy Technologies Office (BETO) and Feedstock-Conversion Interface Consortium (FCIC) in September 2024. Watch the recording.
[Begin presentation]
Erik Ringle, National Renewable Energy Laboratory
Well, hello, everyone, and welcome to today's webinar. My name is Erik Ringle. And before we get started, I'd like to cover some housekeeping items so you know how you can participate and make the most out of the event today. You'll be in listen-only mode during the webinar. You can select audio connection options to listen to your computer audio, or you can dial in through your phone. For the best connection, we generally recommend calling in through a phone line.
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All right. We have two speakers on the agenda for today, Ben Simon and Ed Wolfrum. First, Ben Simon is a technology manager in the Systems Development and Integration group at the U.S. Department of Energy Bioenergy Technologies Office, also known as BETO. The Systems Development and Integration team looks to scale and integrate unit operations to de-risk new technologies to ultimately build engineering scale biorefineries. As a mechanical engineer by training, Ben oversees a portfolio of thermochemical conversion and bulk material handling projects to produce biofuels and biochemicals.
We also have with us today Dr. Ed Wolfrum, who is a principal researcher at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado, and the principal investigator of the Feedstock-Conversion Interface Consortium, or FCIC, which is a collaborative effort of the U.S. Department of Energy's Bioenergy Technologies Office, or remember BETO. Ed holds chemical engineering degrees from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and North Carolina State University.
All right. And with that, I think we're ready to turn things over to you, Ben, to kick us off.
Ben Simon, BETO
Hey, thank you so much here, Erik. If you could go to the next slide. Thank you, everybody, for joining in today. Really glad to see that you're interested in partnering with the Department of Energy, our national labs and the Feedstock-Conversion Interface Consortium, or FCIC, going forward. So I'm hoping we can provide sufficient background on BETO's goals—so again, the Bioenergy Technologies Office—the skills of the FCIC, and the intent of the industrial partnership call, or the IPC, since we like our acronyms.
So BETO is the sponsor of the FCIC. And within the industrial partnership call, we ask applicants to roughly align your technology or your project goals to align with BETO's more broad goals. So I'm hoping to provide an overview of what those are, as well as the target products that BETO is interested in and why BETO wanted to run this IPC. Next slide.
So biomass, you all—if you're on this webinar, you're probably very familiar with what biomass is. But it can be more than either corn grain, corn starch, beans, or wood pellets for heat and power. The Bioenergy Technologies Office, we focus on developing and scaling new technology pathways. So if you're familiar with technology readiness levels, typically starting around two or three and ending at TRL seven or eight.
So because corn grain, corn starch is commercial, we don't primarily focus on that. We're looking at what we call next-generation feedstocks, such as lignocellulosic, like corn stover or forest thinnings; and municipal solid waste, wet waste, such as food waste and animal waste; and purpose-grown energy crops, such as algae or perennial grasses. You'll see a list of these allowable feedstocks within the IPC, but wanted to provide a background on why we're focusing on a certain handful.
So biomass is a wonderful technology. It's nature's carbon removal technology. Instead of pumping more carbon from underground up to the surface for use, biomass is able to capture that carbon from the air. And shown here is a simplistic three different routes that you can go through to convert those biomass and organic wastes into your target products.
The FCIC was formed to really deal with the variability that's in that biomass and how different moisture content can affect the harvesting to the pre-processing, to the pretreatment, all the way through conversion and how each of those different material attributes affects each of these unit operations. Next slide, please.
So I'm borrowing this slide from our friends at the Oak Ridge National Lab for the billion-ton study. So what we're seeing here is the biomass resources and their density across the country. The good news is the U.S. has biomass across the entire country. The bad news is the biomass is spread across the entire country. So there's inherent differences in how each of these feedstocks can be pre-processed and produced at a biorefinery for each of these locations.
For reference, the U.S. today utilizes about 300 million tons of biomass, mostly corn ethanol and biomass-based diesel. But with the Billion-Ton study, it was shown that the U.S. has the potential to produce up to 1.5 billion tons of biomass each year. So we're going to need to mobilize all of that biomass across the country to really meet the nation's greenhouse gas reduction goals. Next slide, please.
So speaking to some specific goals here, I'm not going to go through this in detail, but last year BETO released our Multi-Year Program Plan. This is our five-year strategic R&D plan on how we're going to meet emissions reduction goals. And what I wanted to primarily speak to here are the sectors that we look to operate in.
So the transportation sectors are our primary sectors. That's the biggest emitter within the U.S., followed by power generation. But as an EERE strategy, we're going to see more renewable energy projects come online. Third biggest industry is the industrial sector here. And then finally, we're intrinsically tied to the agriculture sector based on the production of biomass-based energy crops. So these are the three main sectors that we look to operate in. Next slide, please.
So to support those strategic goals, I have a few of our performance goals here. These aren't all of our performance goals, but probably the most applicable for this IPC. So I underlined the takeaways I was hoping you would keep with you. The first one being that greater than 70% greenhouse gas reduction goal relative to petroleum incumbents. So we really want to be pushing the envelope when it comes to greenhouse gas reduction technologies. So we're aiming for over 70%.
On the second bullet, hopefully you've heard of the SAF Grand Challenge. That's our main volumetric goal to produce synthetic aviation fuel. And our third goal is the place-based strategies. More than three climate-smart ag or waste management or other beneficial uses of carbon resources. So in that previous slide—lots of biomass spread across the entire country—maybe what works in one region doesn't necessarily work in the other. So really having to take home that place-based approach.
So these are our goals from a high level. So again, the IPC asks for your technologies or your projects to roughly align with BETO's larger goals. So keep these in mind as you're discussing with the FCIC or developing your proposals. Next slide, please.
So what products are we interested in? Again, the biggest emitter of emissions in the U.S. is the transportation sector. So while we are primarily focused on aviation and synthetic aviation fuel, there is an opportunity for other strategic fuels and maritime, rail, and off-road industries. These are projected to see additional growth and require additional infrastructure to use alternative modes of propulsion, such as electrification and hydrogen.
So we're primarily focused on what are called drop-in biofuels. So these can utilize the existing distribution infrastructure as well as the existing engines that these fuels are combusted in. The other aspect, again, reducing emissions in the industrial sector, the largest contributor within that sector is chemicals where we see projected growth as well. So our main focus here is on polymer resins or plastics, but other chemicals that may need reduced-emission feedstocks.
Real quick, I did want to mention for transportation fuels. While we historically have been focused on liquid fuels at standard temperature and pressure, and new for this year are gaseous fuels, such as renewable natural gas, renewable propane, renewable butane as long as they're used for transportation purposes. Next slide, please.
Lastly here, I wanted to cover—so why is BETO wanting to run an industrial partnership? So I got four bullets for this. The first one is that the FCIC has over seven plus years as a consortium, developing tools, knowledge, design cases on how to handle biomass variability through harvest all the way through conversion.
And I was thinking, Ed, it'd be a really interesting stat maybe if we combined all of the years of experience for the members within the consortium. I imagine we'd have over 1,000—thousands of hours of—I'm sorry, thousands of years of experience within the consortium. So it's time to set them loose and really go apply these tools and knowledge to industrial problems.
The second point here is market pull. We're really seeing a demand from consumers and industries to really have lower carbon-intense products. So we're seeing a lot of interest from the market right now. So the timing is right. And that feeds into my third bullet here, deployments. The Secretary of Energy, we always hear is—her motto and strategy is deploy, deploy, deploy. So the time is—the time is now.
There are resources to support these industries. And again, there's a lot of demand from the consumer side. So we really wanted to provide a rapid response technical assistance. We realize if you're a technology developer right now and you're buying equipment or designing a biorefinery, you don't have a year to negotiate scope and budget. So we have two of our three topics really focused on that rapid response technical assistance to get you the support that you need here today.
And finally, we are very proud of the national labs. They have world-class expertise and resources and facilities, but that can be a cost barrier for a lot of small businesses and entities to work with. So we realized that. So the point of this IPC is that BETO is going to be giving funds to the national labs on your behalf to partner with them. So interested applicants, you're really only bringing in a small portion of your cost-share, depending on the topic, to really partner with the national labs to leverage this expertise here.
So with that, I appreciate you joining the webinar. I really hope you're interested in applying and working with the Feedstock-Conversion Interface Consortium and the DOE national laboratories. Feel free to put any questions in the chat. And if we go to the next slide, I'll pass it over to Ed.
Ed Wolfrum, FCIC
OK. Good morning, everybody. My name is Ed Wolfrum. I am a chemical engineer by training, and I'm currently serving as a principal investigator of the FCIC. So I'd like to add my thanks and my welcome. I appreciate—everybody's busy and I'm glad you have chosen to take an hour out of your day to hear about the IPC.
So I'm just going to do two quick things to get started. First, I'm going to work—I'm going to present a very high level overview of the FCIC and what we're trying to do, and then we'll get right into the details of the industry partnership call. So next slide, please, Erik.
So here's one slide guide to the FCIC. If this is all you want to have time for, this is what the FCIC does. We're a consortium. We're led by the Department of Energy BETO. It's a collaborative effort among researchers from nine different national laboratories. The two key ideas that we work with is that biomass feedstock properties are variable and they're different from other commodities. And empirical approaches to address these issues, frankly, haven't been all that successful.
When I say properties are variable, that variability can be within different species. I think everybody here would recognize that corn stover is intrinsically different than, say, switchgrass or pine residues. That can be variability within the same species. Even within a given plant, there's substantive differences in what we call the anatomical fractions within biomass resources. Everybody knows that pine bark is not the same as pine stem wood.
And that variability can be influenced. So you not only get the intrinsic amount of variability from mother nature, if you will, but how you harvest and collect biomass, how you transport it, how you store it can all introduce more variability into the feedstock. And again, empirical approaches to address these issues haven't been unsuccessful because a lot of the empiricism came from different types of biomass, the familiar commodities, like corn, wheat, rice, et cetera, that have had about 100-year head start on being commodities.
So the national laboratory teams are developing first principles-based knowledge and tools to understand and mitigate the effects of biomass feedstock and process variability on biorefinery projects. So we're working across the whole value chain in this area. Next slide, please, Erik.
If you want to be even more convinced that feedstocks variability is an issue, you need to go no further than reading this report from a workshop eight years ago, give or take, looking at the state of biorefinery optimization, where there were over 100 participants from national labs, from industry, from academic institutions, and to go through and essentially debrief on the state of the industry. And I encourage you to download the report. There's a link. It's, of course, free to download.
And as part of the workshop the respondents were asked to list the key operational challenges that caused trouble for that generation of biorefineries. And five of the top eight were directly connected and related to feedstock variability, how it flowed, what its properties were, and the fact that firm specifications didn't exist.
If you look at two of the other ideas in terms of equipment uptime and lack of performance data, I personally would argue that those have a lot to do with the fact that there's not performance data on biomass processes, nor is there—and because of that, the equipment that got used failed more often than they would have liked. So I'd argue all top five have to do with the variability of feedstocks. And so after this workshop, the Department of Energy, BETO, got together and decided to launch the FCIC. Next slide, please.
And again, we talked about that it's a collaboration among researchers of nine national laboratories. We are tied together. One of our key operating concepts is the quality by design, or QBD. Any of you with colleagues in the biopharmaceuticals area—this is a very familiar concept. FDA-endorsed. It's how biopharmaceuticals are monitored and run.
But if you're not familiar with that area, but you are a chemical engineer, for example, it's essentially very similar in concepts to a unit operation, which is from a principle of chemical engineering, any feedstock or any input material even more broadly, can be turned into almost any output material by connecting a series of unit operations, like transport and comminution or chopping up material, pyrolysis, gasification, fermentation, et cetera.
And by designing all of the unit operations, what the overall process looks like, and operating them in a specific way, you can make pretty much anything into anything else. That's the generalization, but I think you all get my point. And this is how the FDA, again, in particular monitors the performance of drug manufacturers in the U.S.
The key principle is that we focus on the unit—on the unit operations and pay a lot of attention to the attributes, the chemical, the physical and mechanical attributes of the materials going into a unit operation, coming out of the unit operation, and then the critical process parameters, how that unit operation is operated. What is the temperature of the fermenter? What is the enzyme dose for the enzymatic hydrolysis step? How is the pyrolysis reactor operated?
We are moving from feedstock names to feedstock attributes, and that is one of the overarching things that we ought to keep in mind. So that's the next slide. That's the high-level view of the FCIC. You can check out our website, which is a link at the end of the page, to find out a little bit more about who we are and the areas that we are working in. But I thought we'll spend the rest of the time today talking about the industry partnership call or the FCIC—or the IPC, the FCIC IPC. And we'll outdo Ben in acronyms this morning or this afternoon. Next slide, please.
So the full industry partnership call, the IPC, is available at this link. And again, it's on our website. No need to write this down. But the overall intent is to apply the capabilities that the FCIC has developed to real-world problems. We want to focus on leveraging existing capabilities and facilities as opposed to developing new ones.
A full list of the capabilities and tools are on the IPC call website and the larger NREL or the larger FCIC website. So I won't rattle all of those—all of those off here. I've got a few slides about key capabilities or some capabilities. These are meant to be—to be representative, not exhaustive. So next slide.
The national labs within the FCIC have done quite a bit of work in characterizing feedstocks and the variability. We've also looked at—looking at the impact of those—variability of that on conversion. That's a relatively new paper out. Next slide, please.
We have developed substantial experimental and computational capabilities and pyrolysis and gasification, multiscale modeling with lots of experimentally validated data to validate the models. We've developed tools to predict blade wear in mills and the general area of wear across the biorefinery spectrum. Next slide.
We've also developed a lot of computational, again, experimentally validated computational tools to predict the flow of biomass in hoppers, for example, on inclined flow, in augers, for example, including not only the computational tools that require supercomputer clusters, but the experimental capabilities to both parameterize and validate these models. We talk about a non-validated model is not worth using.
So that's a snapshot and yet not meant to be exhaustive, but representative of the tools and capabilities of the FCIC. And I'd encourage you all to check out our website to find out more about them.
OK. On to the industry partnership call. It's got three topic areas. Topic area one, a cooperative research and development agreement or CRADA, CRADA partnerships. Topic area two, rapid technical assistance, and topic area three, biorefinery technical assistance.
Topic area one needs a CRADA. We'll talk a little bit about that. And topic areas one and three require cost-share. Again, these slides will be available. It's all on the website. Don't bother to write this stuff down. I do want to be a little clearer. Ben made this point, I'd like to mention as well. This is an opportunity to get national laboratory support on directed problems. So all the funding will go directly to the national laboratories, not to the industry applicants, just so we're clear on that. Next slide, please.
The CRADA partnership. So this is intended to partner stakeholders with one or more national labs who are associated with the FCIC. It's actually nine different labs. The CRADA will identify any background IP that the industry partner has so that we can protect it and also protect any IP that gets developed during the project.
The applicant has to commit about a minimum of 20% cost-share, which can actually include in-kind or cash. The overwhelming majority of the successful projects are done with in-kind cash or cost-share, of course. These have a broad range of federal shares and can last up to three years. This is the same structure, same approach as the 2023 FCIC CRADA call. Next slide.
If you're not familiar with that, in 2023, again, BETO funded a CRADA call within the FCIC that ended up with seven projects totaling almost $4.5 million in areas from grinding to MSW characterization to stabilized py-oil work, some gasification work, and some bioproducts work. You can click on this website link at the bottom to get a little bit more info about these projects. But this is the intent of the topic area one, is to work on CRADA projects with industry partners. Next slide, please.
The second area is a new area, technical assistance process—projects, excuse me. And it's intended to provide industry stakeholders with rapid technical assistance from a single laboratory. Does not require CRADA. It's not going to generate IP, and there's no cost-share required. Our goal here is to launch these very quickly and have a—and they'd be relatively small, but get them up, get them executed quickly.
And this is an area where a specific national laboratory inside the FCIC has a very specific skill set that would line up with a need. But because of the nature of the way the national laboratory systems work, it sometimes can be very, very difficult to fund relatively small projects very quickly just because of the nature of the work.
But the national labs have a number of capabilities where just a little bit of help could go quite a long way. And that's the goal here, is to skip the tortuosity, if you will, of working on the financial part of it and focus on the technical work. So that is topic area number two.
Next slide talks about topic area number three. This is a similar idea, that's a hybrid of the first two topic areas, biorefinery technical assistance projects. The goal here is to support current projects with rapid design, operational troubleshooting, specific help from one or more of the national laboratories. It is available to any biorefinery project in the pilot-, demo-, or commercial-scale phase, either planning, design, or operating.
We don't anticipate the projects will generate IP. Will not require CRADA. Obviously, it goes without saying that we protect all of these projects with non-disclosure agreements, but this will not require CRADA. We anticipate these projects to have substantial involvement from the applicant and need to commit a minimum of 50% in-kind cost-share to the project. And last—and these could last—be funded up to about 3/4 of $1 million and last up to 24 months. Next slide.
This is simply the summary table. So this is what we just talked about. And again, only one of the three areas needs a CRADA and only two of the areas need some type of cost-share. And to be clear on the biorefinery technical assistance one, there is no opportunity for a cash cost-share on that. We do require substantial involvement of the industry partners. So that's only in-kind cost-share. Next slide.
Ben covered at a very high level the eligible feedstocks. I am not going to read this entire slide. And again, this is in the call. It's on the website, but we're looking at lignocellulosic biomass, oilseed crops, MSW, organic waste, food waste. Next.
And these are areas that the FCIC researchers have been working in. We're looking at all the unit operations after harvesting up to including conversion. And if we're looking at the organic, the waste streams, if you will, I guess food waste as well in this category, all the operations after initial collection of the material up to including a conversion operation.
We're looking at both low-temperature and high-temperature processes. So the familiar low temperature ones, pretreatment enzymatic hydrolysis, microbial conversion, anaerobic digestion, and high-temperature processes, like pyrolysis and gasification, hydrothermal liquefaction. The eligible conversion products include finished biofuels, both liquid and gaseous, bioproducts and intermediates that could then be converted to finished biofuels through more processes. So pretty much the gamut of pre-processing, pretreatment, and conversion. Next slide, please.
More details. All the applicants have to be for-profit or nonprofit entities. We are not extending this opportunity to universities and colleges. Targeting your citizens and lawful permanent residents, foreign entities, they can apply, but we've got to go through a process for DOE approval if it gets selected.
And again, all federal funds will be spent by one of the national laboratories. No funds to get to pass through. And depending on the topic area, the partner organizations do have to meet the requirements for cost-share. Getting to a more details. Next slide, please.
Here's a timeline. So today is happy September 16. We're doing the webinar now. The notice of intent deadline is November 1. We'll talk a little bit about that. That is not a big lift. That is an email. And then we will be scheduling presentations to hear more details about the pitch and make sure that you're connected with the appropriate personnel at the national laboratories. And then the final proposals for all the areas will be due December 6. So we've got about six weeks left until the notice of intent, so plenty of time.
Once the proposals go in, we'll be doing the external review for the rest of December, January, and February with a goal of BETO announcing project selections the first week in March and then with a kickoff no later than October of 2025. Next slide, please.
So what do you have to do? First thing, send a notice of intent. This is not a pre-proposal. This is not a concept paper. This is an email that says, I'm interested in proposing to this call, your name, your organizational email, contact information, which of the three topic areas, and if you've got a proposed national laboratory partner that you'd like to work with.
If you don't have that information, if you don't know about the capabilities of the lab partners, that's fine. We can help with that as well. And we will let you know that we have it within about a one working day.
However, before you send that notice of intent in and you're thinking about proposing a project under topic area number one, the CRADA projects, please take a look at the terms of the CRADA itself. It's a legal document. It's been reviewed and approved by essentially all the national laboratories. So that's nine labs have pretty much signed off on this. It will be used for all of topic area one projects.
It’s non-negotiable. So there is no opportunities to change the terms of that if you're unable—if your organization knows that you're unable to sign that or thinks you might want to consider proposing to one of the other two categories—topics, excuse me. So again, send us an email by November 1 at fcic@nrel.gov.
Step two is on the next slide. All applicants to topic areas one and three, we're asking to give a short presentation of the proposed project using the FCIC presentation template. The presentation should only be about 20 minutes, and then we'll have a 20-minute conversation afterwards to ask and answer questions. And as soon as you send in the notice of intent, we're going to start scheduling those. We'll have to have six or seven people on the call. So those will take a little bit of time to get those set up.
After that presentation, we will either encourage or discourage a full proposal submission. We will provide that feedback via email within five days after the presentation. If it's encouraged and the applicants don't have a National Lab partner, then they will be partnered with a lab to work on putting that proposal together. Because of the nature of the topic area two, we're not going to ask people to do a presentation, but please you can contact fcic@nrel.gov with any questions about the scope or the work involved in that proposal. Next slide, please.
So step three, develop the proposal. So we have three different templates, one for each of the topic areas, that you can download from the IPC website. Please read the templates carefully and please ensure that you're following all the instructions, including the length and the cost-share. And again, both of those things vary by topic area.
And I'd be—a lot of the problems that typically come up with these proposals is please take some extra time to read through the proposal call carefully as well. So not only the template, but the call itself, which, again, is on the website. We've also provided a scoring rubric for guidelines on how to prepare an effective proposal.
So what are the sections within each of the proposal templates and how much they're worth out of a total score of 100%, for example? And then what constitutes a good and perhaps a bad way of answering those questions? So get that done. Next slide.
Submit it via email no later than a minute before midnight on December 6 to this email address. And a legal notice, FCIC and BETO will use the information provided in the proposal for the review process. They will not share this information for any other purpose, and it will be retained indefinitely. And you have a link to the security and privacy policy here.
So that is a project—that is a proposal call in a nutshell. On the next slide, I want to just say a little bit more about the CRADA. Again, successful applicants to topic area one must sign the CRADA before the project starts. And the terms are non-negotiable. So please, we're strongly encouraging you to take a look at that and make sure it's something that your company is going to be comfortable signing.
Probably hasn't escaped anybody's notice that this is the second time I've said that, so it must be important. So please keep that in mind and take a look and make sure you're comfortable signing that. You do not need to sign it to submit a proposal, but you do need to have it signed if you're successful and the project goes forward. It needs to be signed before the project starts.
We do have a list of frequently asked questions, next slide, please, Erik, on our website. I'll pick three of the top ones just so we're clear. These slides and the recording of this will be up on the website shortly, probably mid to late next week. Takes us a little bit time to get them posted. The funding is not available to companies. All the money in this call will be spent by researchers at the national laboratories.
Can I submit multiple proposals? Yes, provided they are different from each other. So we have no concerns about someone submitting a proposal in two different topic areas or even the same topic area with two different ideas. And I will refer you all to—let's see. On the next page, I've got a couple more.
Cost-share. And I saw—I think we've seen some activity in the chat or I've noticed that many of you are familiar with cost share. Perhaps some of you aren't. It's calculated on the total project cost, not just the federal share. So if someone was asking for a $400,000 of federal support for topic area one, we said the project requires 20% cost share. So the minimum cost share is $100,000 because it's calculated as 20% of the total.
So $400k of federal support plus $100k of cost share means the total project budget is $500k. 20% of $500k is $100k. If you have any other questions, please visit the website and view our current list of frequently asked questions. If you don't see an answer to your question there, please just submit them to fcic@nrel.gov. I'm monitoring that and we have more than just me looking at that email address. That's the fastest way to get your question answered.
And so I think with that, we will open the floor, so to speak, with questions that came into the Q&A session. I think Erik you'll be taking over from here.
Erik Ringle
Yes. Yeah. Thanks—Thanks Ed, thanks, Ben, for those informative presentations. We do have time for a couple of questions here. And as a reminder, if you haven't already, you can use that Q&A box to submit that question. If we have time, we'll work through this list. We have quite a few.
Just one quick warm up question as more folks are putting in their questions, can you provide examples of projects for the three topic areas, just speaking generally?
Ed Wolfrum
Sure. Well, I think a great example of the projects for the first topic area are included in that list of recently awarded CRADA call topics. But for example, one of those is the project with AMP Robotics. We're making automated sortation systems to process waste.
And that project is funding work at Idaho National Laboratory to characterize the physical, chemical, and mechanical properties of the separated waste and also funding work at NREL to characterize the gasification performance of that waste. So it is going to be feeding back useful technical information to that company to know how well their system is performing.
The second topic area is new. So here's a couple of examples. Each of the national laboratories have a number of capabilities, and I'm not going to rattle them all off. But if there are some specific area of help that a company needed, that would be a opportunity there. For example, Argonne National Laboratory, starting with the A's, many of you are probably familiar with the GREET model to calculate life-cycle inventories and life-cycle analysis that was developed by Michael Wang at Argonne. That is a unique skillset at that lab.
Going to the B's, Berkeley National Laboratory has fermentation capabilities within their advanced—the ABP, advanced bioprocessing process development unit. And so if a company was interested in getting some microbial conversion performance data on some of their streams, fermentation, colloquially, that would be a project where the Berkeley team could do some work, get performance information of your strains on a particular substrate for a particular product.
That information would be very helpful to a company, but it wouldn't represent IP. And so it doesn't need a CRADA. It is just conversion performance data. Likewise, NREL has compositional analysis capabilities for biomass. We have done a ton of work. So there's three examples. I won't go through all the other nine.
In the third topic area, this is focused on existing products—existing biorefinery projects that have a specific problem, say, for example, in feedstock handling and they need to characterize the handling performance of their feedstock. That would be a role, for example, Idaho National Laboratories with the—
Ben Simon
Biomass Feedstock National User Facility.
Ed Wolfrum
BFNUF—the Biomass Feedstock National User Facility. Thank you, Ben. That was a mouthful. Where they could—the folks from the BFNUF, which is how they refer to it, could come in, take a look at the process, make specific suggestions, do some pilot plant work to validate the performance of existing equipment in the BFNUF. Ben, I don't know if you wanted to add to any of those topics.
Ben Simon
No, that's great. Thanks, Ed. I think that even answers one of the questions we had in the Q&A there about the 70% greenhouse gas metric. Yes, that does apply to the incumbent product, typically petroleum-based. And the second part of that question was, can part of the—it was part of the application. I imagine the question was, can part of the project that we have with the national labs include a life-cycle analysis of your targeted bioproduct? And I would say, yes, absolutely that would fit within scope within each of these topic areas.
Erik Ringle
All right, great. There was a question about the cost-share basis for a CRADA. Maybe it's worth revisiting that again. The question was about whether it's a funding request or total project costs. Ed or Ben, can you address that and add some more detail?
Ed Wolfrum
I think in a word, it's total project cost. So $1 million project would consist of—a 20% cost-share, for example, for the topic area one would consist of $800,000 of federal funds and $200,000 of either cash or in-kind cost-share.
Erik Ringle
All right. Moving down the list here, a question about algae, whether or not algae is eligible or not.
Ben Simon
Yeah, I can take that one. Yeah, algae is an emerging energy crop, as we call it, within BETO. And the reason it's not included within the FCIC is because BETO has an entire Advanced Algal Systems portfolio where we have a separate consortium, separate funding opportunity announcements, and other solicitations primarily focused on algae conversion.
Since it's a aquatic feedstock, the FCIC was originally propped up, that 7 plus years ago I mentioned, to really address the challenges with terrestrial feedstocks. In particular, it was in response to the bioenergy workshop report that Ed mentioned, which was held closely after. There was a large cellulosic ethanol project in the Midwest that had a lot of biomass handling challenges. So the intent of the FCIC was more focused on traditional terrestrial feedstocks while there are other opportunities for algae.
Erik Ringle
Great. All right. Next question. Is a possible outcome of a presentation a switch in topic areas?
Ed Wolfrum
Sure. Yeah. This is—the purpose of these presentations is to rapidly understand the nature of the project and figure out the best path forward. Unlike a traditional FOA, which is—I don't know how many folks here have done those. It's a very involved process here.
What we're trying to do is talk with our industry stakeholders, the guys, the folks who are interested in the project, and literally have a conversation to find out what the problem is and how we could best help. So if we decide that after that, that maybe this isn't a topic area one project, maybe it should be a topic area three project, absolutely. And if we're looking—if you go—or vice versa.
So yeah, that would be a completely acceptable outcome. Again, our goal is to understand the problem and to connect.
Erik Ringle
Ed, I think we just lost you there for a second. If you would turn off your camera and see if that works. Ben, I don't know if there's anything else you can add to that response.
Ben Simon
Yeah, just to reiterate. Yeah, even if you don't have a specific target area and if you—that's the point of those initial conversations, those pitches and discussions with the FCIC to talk through what challenge you have, what type of project are you looking to move forward with. And you can certainly come into those conversations and we can have that matchmaking conversation during those calls. So yeah.
Erik Ringle
OK. Ed, I'm not sure if we have you back or not. But if not, we'll go ahead and move here down the list. The next question, Ben, this is part of the Q&A. It said—on the Q&A slide, it said something along the lines of, will any funds be distributed to applicants? No. All awarded funds will be sent within the participating national labs with applicants directing how resources and expertise within the FCIC are applied within the collaboration.
So the question is, could you please clarify, quote unquote, "applicants" directing how resources and expertise within the FCIC are applied within the collaboration? Hopefully that makes sense.
Ben Simon
Yeah. So if we are talking about—that makes me think of the cost to share. So yeah, to reiterate all the federal funding, the $5 million that BETO has available here, will be sent to the national laboratories to work on the scope that the FCIC, the national lab, or the contact at the national lab and interested applicants have negotiated.
So you can come in. It's a back and forth. It's a discussion. It's negotiation on scope. We want it to be of interest to both the applicants and then also make sure it fits within the FCIC capabilities. So part of these developments, you can certainly work with the national labs and the PIs within the FCIC to really figure out what that budget is from the national laboratory perspective to put that into your full application. So the national labs will work with you on that to clarify their cost of involvement for their portion of the scope.
On the other side, the cost-share, I think Ed spoke to two of the topic areas requiring that cost share. We will rely on the applicants to define how you calculate your cost share. Typically, that is personnel salaries, fringe, indirects, maybe some materials that you're applying or supplying to the projects. All of that would be lumped into the cost share category. So hopefully that answers the question. If not, please send us an email and we can elaborate.
Erik Ringle
Thanks for that, Ben. Ed, it looks like you're back. I'm not sure if you heard that question. Have anything to add?
Ed Wolfrum
No, I apologize. I was here and then I was gone.
Erik Ringle
It happens. All right. Well, then in that case, I'm just going to move down the list here. OK. Question. We have an ARPA-E grant for our conversion process. However, we would like to apply to FCIC to help secure our feedstocks. Since we do not get cash from this, are there specific guidelines in how to ensure separation beyond timecard tracking?
Ben Simon
So it sounds like this is a question if it's a federal grant. So federal funds cannot be used as cost share. Double dipping, almost using federal funds as cost share to get federal funds for the other portion. So if you're looking into how do we calculate our cost share under this project? Again, like the answer that I just had, timesheets are a great way, looking at hourly rates. It'd be great to discuss that with the FCIC task leads or groups that you're working with, figuring out what are the total hours based on this proposed scope?
So looking at salaries, benefits, indirect rates. A lot of companies will have those internally within your accounting teams. And then again, yeah, any materials provided to the projects, whether that's actual cash value for supplies or cash values for shipping material to the national labs would be in regards to how to calculate the cost share being provided to this project.
Erik Ringle
Great. All right.
Ben Simon
Sorry. I guess I would just add—just because you have ARPA-E grant does not disqualify you from applying to this FCIC IPC, so long as those scopes are separate and unique. Obviously, if you're having an aspect of that ARPA-E grant that you would like to expand upon that's outside the scope of that ARPA-E grant, that is certainly allowable and encouraged.
Erik Ringle
Great. OK, here's one. Can the industry partnerships project be defined within a larger scale program or cost share may be included? For instance, if a $40 million recycling green energy plant is being built, can the project be included as a subset of the overall program?
Ed Wolfrum
I guess without knowing the details, I could imagine that this would be a perfect opportunity to get national laboratory support to help de-risk that project. I don't know that I would think—I wouldn't think of it—I don't think it's useful to think of it as a subset of a larger project. I think of it as a separate project that would be addressing a specific issue that, say, that $40 million project came up.
So it wouldn't have to get rolled up in all the paperwork of a $40 million project. You could say that we're having specific issues on feedstock variability on this project and we'd like to get some characterization help and some reprocessing help, and we'd focus it that way. And again, all of the rules that Ben mentioned about no double dipping on cash would still apply. But I think of it more as a targeted project to de-risk the existing project as rather than a subset of anything.
Erik Ringle
Alright. Next question. For topic area two, may I ask if inorganic compounds and feedstock is considered? This person says, our microorganism uses inorganic feedstock to fix CO2, such as treated domestic wastewater or paper pulp waste, et cetera.
Ben Simon
Yeah, so as long as the—so yeah, there are certainly inorganic compounds if you're coming—if there's a, yeah, domestic wastewater, a lot gets put down the drain and flushed there. So we would still consider that an organic waste. So that would still be an allowable feedstock per the IPC here. So yeah, as long as the—usually, we use the rule of 50% of the input carbon going into the resulting products, that if inorganic compounds come along for the ride, that that would still be an allowable feedstock.
Erik Ringle
OK. We have just a couple more minutes, maybe a question—time for one question or two questions. So this one says, do we need to apply with each national lab or will that be done after a match is made?
Ed Wolfrum
No, there is don't have—you apply through the fcic@nrel.gov website. Purely coincidentally, I happen to work at NREL. This is not an NREL-funded project. I'm simply coordinating all the work. But please reach out to us at fcic@nrel.gov if you have questions about finding a national laboratory. You don't have to wait for the notice of intent. You don't have to wait for the pitch.
Sooner you get ahold of us to ask questions about the skillsets you might like, the faster we can connect and you can have very productive conversations. Think of the pitch things and the email address as a clearinghouse, trying to find the best help for each of our industry stakeholders.
Erik Ringle
Alright. Maybe time for just one more question before we wrap up. May I ask for topic area two that doesn't require IP but would an NDA be processed to protect the developed technology from the industry?
Ed Wolfrum
We do everything under an NDA. That is not a concern. It's just that if we are troubleshooting a particular part of the project or there's specific skillsets in topic area two, again, compositional analysis of biomass, that data may be very valuable to your company, but our compositional analysis methods are published and downloadable for free, and there's a couple of labs that can do it. So we'll do it under an NDA, so the data won't go out, but there's no IP associated with it from the national laboratory perspective.
Erik Ringle
Alright. Well, that is all the time we have for questions. And I do appreciate everyone's—there's been some activity in the Q&A box. There's some questions we weren't able to get to. Darren put an email in the chat that you can contact to try to get some more information or you can go to the website here on the screen.
But again, thanks Ben and Ed for the presentation and discussion. Thanks to everyone who attended the webinar. As a reminder, we will have these slides and a recording of the presentation on the FCIC website here in the coming days. And with that, I think our webinar is concluded. We hope you have a great rest of your day, and thank you very much.
Ben Simon
Thank you, everybody.
Ed Wolfrum
Thanks very much.
[End presentation]