Transportation Energy Resources From Renewable Agriculture (TERRA)

The summary for the Transportation Energy Resources From Renewable Agriculture (TERRA) grant is detailed below. This summary states who is eligible for the grant, how much grant money will be awarded, current and past deadlines, Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance (CFDA) numbers, and a sampling of similar government grants. Verify the accuracy of the data FederalGrants.com provides by visiting the webpage noted in the Link to Full Announcement section or by contacting the appropriate person listed as the Grant Announcement Contact. If any section is incomplete, please visit the website for the Headquarters, which is the U.S. government agency offering this grant.

Transportation Energy Resources From Renewable Agriculture (TERRA): Agency Overview:

The Advanced Research Projects Agency ? Energy (ARPA-E), an organization within the Department of Energy, is chartered by Congress in the America COMPETES Act of 2007 (P.L. 110-69), as amended by the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2010 (P.L. 111-358), to support the creation of transformational energy technologies and systems through funding and managing Research and Development (R&D) efforts. Originally chartered in 2007, the Agency was first funded through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

The mission of ARPA-E is to identify and fund research to translate science into breakthrough energy technologies that are too risky for the private sector and that, if successfully developed, will create the foundation for entirely new industries.

Successful projects will address at least one of ARPA-E?s two Mission Areas:

1. Enhance the economic and energy security of the United States through the development of energy technologies that result in:

a. reductions of imports of energy from foreign sources;
b. reductions of energy-related emissions, including greenhouse gases; and
c. improvement in the energy efficiency of all economic sectors.

2. Ensure that the United States maintains a technological lead in developing and deploying advanced energy technologies.

Program Overview:

There is an urgent need to accelerate energy crop development for the production of renewable transportation fuels from biomass. Recent technological advancements have now made it possible to extract massive volumes of genetic, physiological, and environmental data from certain crops, but, even with these resources, the data still cannot be processed into the knowledge needed to predict crop performance in the field. This knowledge is required to improve the breeding development pipeline for energy crops. Building upon precision agriculture innovations and data-intensive computational approaches, ARPA-E believes that it is now possible to accelerate plant breeding, using robust high-throughput precision phenotyping systems, to quantify important agronomic traits in the field throughout the entire lifecycle of an individual plant, and to associate these traits with their genetic and genomic properties. This ARPA-E program, Transportation Energy Resources from Renewable Agriculture (TE
RRA), is an investment in technologies that increase the precision, accuracy and throughput of energy crop breeding, to enable (a) new predictive algorithms for plant growth, (b) more detailed measurements for plant physiology, and (c) more sophisticated bioinformatics pipelines for gene discovery and trait association. TERRA will enable breeders to evaluate more individual plants, to select appropriate plants for breeding earlier in the growing season, to capture better information about them during their development, and to associate this information with the best genes to propagate. Success will be measured by the prospective ability to predict yield gains early, specifically, to identify which genes can improve carbon capture efficiency in newly cultivated bioenergy crops. Although other crops will be considered, this program intends to focus on energy sorghum as a model system because of its potential for improvement through breeding, its resources for genetic analysis, its geo
graphic adaptability, and its commercial utility.

To obtain a copy of the Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) please go to the ARPA-E website at https://arpa-e-foa.energy.gov. ARPA-E will not review or consider concept papers submitted through other means. For detailed guidance on using ARPA-E eXCHANGE, please refer to the ARPA-E eXCHANGE User Guide (https://arpa-e-foa.energy.gov/Manuals.aspx).