Corinne Scown

Corinne Scown

@cdscown.bsky.social

Senior scientist working on bioenergy 🌱 & circular plastics ♻️ LCA/TEA | Mom of 2, Opinions=own (she/her)

353 followers536 following200 posts

UCB study on the human health impacts of deploying carbon capture and sequestration, now out in @natureportfolio.nature.com Nature Sustainability! Fascinating and not-at-all-obvious takeaways about when it's good, when it's bad, and how to make it better. Check out the paper here: rdcu.be/fopCu

rdcu.beHuman health effects of amine-based carbon capture and storage in the US electricity sectorNature Sustainability - Postcombustion carbon capture and storage (CCS) at power plants can lower CO2 emissions, but the health benefits may depend on the solvents used and control of related NH3...

In the last few weeks my 9 y/o 1) got a land line to start calling her friends, 2) completed her first gig as a magician at a kindergartner's bday party. If you're worried that you'll miss how cute your kid is as a baby, don't worry. This is just a whole different level.

Have you ever wished you could assemble lots of TEAs quickly on a tech? Understand where the assumptions differed? Maybe even use them to generate a custom design for your needs drawing on prior analyses? This is what we are working on: projectpisces.org and we need YOU. Reach out to get involved.

projectpisces.orgProject PISCES - Process Integration & Synthesis using Chemical Engineering StandardsStandardizing bioprocess flowsheet data for AI-powered knowledge extraction and analysis

As we coast into the Thanksgiving holiday, I'm taking time to appreciate just how incredible my group members (past and present). Fundraising can be a struggle, especially now, but it's so worth it when I look around and see what they're accomplishing β™₯️ Grateful for them & our awesome collaborators

AI integration sounds great but how about we fix app interfaces so I don't have to scroll through every single month between now and the day I was born in 1985 just to finish ordering a takeout sandwich?

Got vaccinated for flu and COVID at work today and, out of habit, did not actually look at the shots. So it was a delightful surprise to find these sweet Garfield bandaids on both arms hours later.

This project has been so cool. Real powerhouse team πŸ™Œ

#BioBSE researchers Jay Keasling and @cdscown.bsky.social are contributing to a cleaner planet by being part of a newly funded project to develop biodegradable bioplastics from domestic biomass. #WorldCleanupDay @berkeleyengineer.bsky.social @berkeleylab.lbl.gov go.lbl.gov/bioplastics

Another @jbei.lbl.gov publication hot off the presses! 7 herbaceous, 9 woody, 4 food processing residues, and 2 blends all decontructed using butylamine. We can hit $1.3 to 6.1/kg sugar now, process intensification needed to hit $0.45–0.79/kg. pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...

pubs.acs.orgCost of Deconstruction Depots for Diversified, Waste-Based Lignocellulosic Sugars Using Distillable SolventsTransitioning to a bioeconomy that makes use of low-emission and waste feedstocks requires greater flexibility to accommodate seasonal variations and mitigate long-term storage challenges, such as material loss and fire risk. To achieve this goal, biomass deconstruction technologies must efficiently handle diverse feedstocks. Here, we assess the cost of using butylamine─a distillable solvent─to deconstruct 22 different biomass feedstocks: 7 herbaceous, 9 woody, 4 food processing residues, and 2 blends. Lignocellulosic sugar production costs, based on current empirical data, range from $1.3 to 6.1/kg, suggesting that substantial improvements are required to compete with conventional sugars. The high solvent loading (850 g/kg of whole slurry) is a process bottleneck. Lowering the solvent loading to 59 g/kg of whole slurry, demonstrated in an L-scale reactor using poplar biomass, reduces the minimum sugar selling price by 33%. Solvent loading and recovery, solid loading, sugar yield, enzyme use, and delivered biomass cost all play key roles in reaching sugar production costs of $0.45–0.79/kg. Strategic feedstock blending to maximize carbohydrate content, process optimization to improve conversion efficiency, and the selection of low-cost feedstocks are important to advancing feedstock-flexible biorefineries.
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How much xylan vs. glucan is in your original feedstock REALLY matters. Capital-constrained biorefineries operating with shorter residence times can justify paying up to 1.5X to 2X the price for feedstocks with very high glucan to xylan ratios.

So what does this mean? Well, you can engineer plants to increase the glucan to xylan ratio. You can select feedstocks with a more favorable ratio. And/or you can focus on hosts and other bioprocessing strategies to enable full consumption of both sugars in less time.

My fabulous postdoc, Jaya, led a new analysis in which we used empirical data to figure out how the glucose-to-xylose ratio in 🌱 feedstocks impacts likely residence times and costs. We looked at ethanol (anaerobically produced) and bisabolene (aerobically produced).

As my darling son snuggled up to read about dinosaurs, something fell out of his hair and on to my sleeve...to whom it may concern, here is why I am now behind on getting things done (except laundry, which I am now VERY much on top of)

In light of news that they might get their budget cut, I just want to share how absolutely amazing the CSB’s investigations and videos for the public are. I used them for teaching. It always made me proud that our government supports stuff like this: youtube.com/@uscsb?si=lX...

youtube.comUSCSBThe CSB is an independent federal agency charged with investigating incidents and hazards that result, or may result, in the catastrophic release of extremely hazardous substances. The agency’s core m...
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We constrained DACS build-out based on geologic storage. West Texas and upper Rocky Mountain regions have great potential. 7 million ha have the potential for co-located new electricity generation and perennial grasses that are good for the soil and provide BiCRS feedstocks.

In bioprocesses, not all sugars are created equal. Hosts preferentially consume glucose and that has CAPEX implications. If you can bump the glucose-to-xylose ratio up by 3.5X, your feedstock's value can INCREASE by >$77/ton. New @jbei.lbl.gov preprint: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

papers.ssrn.comCost Impact of Hexose-to-Pentose Sugar Ratios for BiomanufacturingCentral to the long-term vision for biomanufacturing is the ability to deconstruct plant cell walls to sugars that microbes can convert to products. Aside from

Wow this writeful AI tool in overleaf is aggressively unhelpful. Like, instead of writing "CO$_2$ emissions" in your LaTeX file, how about if you wrote "CO emissions $_2$"? Same paragraph: it suggests rearranging the order from "diversified and resilient" to "resilient and diversified"...ok but why