Who We Are

The Bioeconomy Institute (BEI) is an outgrowth of the Bioeconomy Initiative -- a campuswide effort, launched in 2002, to investigate the use of biorenewable resources as sustainable feedstocks for producing chemicals, fuels, materials, and energy. Today, the BEI has over 160 faculty affiliated members who contribute to the Bioeconomy Initiative with over $51 million in cumulative sponsored research funding from industry and federal agencies ranging from the Department of Agriculture to the National Science Foundation.

Those involved in the Bioeconomy Initiative realize that in the process of moving beyond our current dependence on petroleum, the bioeconomy is nothing less than a revolution in the way society will supply itself with essential sources of carbon and energy. Just as petroleum refiners have been inextricably connected to places and cultures where oil was deposited in the earth, the biorefiners of the future will be inextricably connected to agriculture and forestry. However, unlike petroleum drilling, biorenewable feedstocks are produced from an ecosystem that needs to be conserved and renewed in order to ensure future production capacity. Therefore, the bioeconomy will require tight linkages between plant breeding, soil fertility, sustainable crop production, biomass transportation and logistics, rural communities, bioprocessing, distribution, and marketing services.

Like many land-grant institutions, Iowa State's faculty has been engaged for many years in both fundamental and applied research projects related to biorenewable resources and biobased products. What distinguishes ISU is its early recognition that single objective, single investigator approaches to problems in this field have stymied progress toward commercialization of biobased technologies. The BEI was established to provide cohesion among the diverse efforts in biorenewable resources on campus and to encourage collaboration among departments, colleges, and research units. To date, the BEI has engaged 29 departments in all seven colleges and 20 research centers and institutes.