DE-FOA-0002657 | DE FOA 0002657

Opportunity Information: Apply for DE FOA 0002657

DE-FOA-0002657 is a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) request for information (RFI) issued by the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), specifically to support planning by DOE's Bioenergy Technologies Office (BETO). Even though it carries a FOA-style identifier, it is not a funding opportunity and does not accept grant applications. Instead, DOE is gathering input from a wide range of stakeholders to shape future Conversion Research and Development priorities and to keep BETO's techno-economic analysis (TEA) and life-cycle analysis (LCA) work aligned with what researchers and industry actually need.

The RFI focuses on three technical areas where DOE wants practical feedback about gaps, barriers, and promising approaches. The first area is improving the robustness of microbial cells used in bioenergy and bioproduct conversion pathways. This typically relates to how well production organisms perform under real-world process conditions, including stressors like inhibitors in biomass-derived hydrolysates, variable feedstock quality, high product titers that can become toxic to the cells, contamination pressure, temperature and pH swings, and scale-up effects that often reduce performance compared to bench-scale results. DOE is looking for perspectives on what is currently limiting microbial stability, productivity, and tolerance, and what R&D directions would meaningfully improve resilience in operating environments that resemble industrial conditions.

The second area is improving the robustness of catalytic processes used in conversion, which generally concerns the stability, lifetime, selectivity, and performance consistency of catalysts when exposed to realistic feeds and operating conditions. Stakeholder feedback here commonly includes issues like catalyst deactivation (for example, coking, poisoning by impurities, sintering, or leaching), sensitivity to feedstock-derived contaminants, process upsets, regeneration strategies, and the tradeoffs between activity, selectivity, and durability. DOE is essentially asking what catalyst robustness problems most often prevent reliable, cost-effective operation at scale, and what types of research, testing protocols, or validation environments would best accelerate progress.

The third area is state-of-technology (SOT) analyses across the BETO research portfolio. SOT work is meant to provide an objective snapshot of current performance and cost for key conversion pathways, often feeding into TEA and LCA to benchmark progress and inform R&D targets. DOE is seeking feedback on how these analyses can remain useful and credible to both the research community and industry, including what assumptions should be updated, what data gaps most undermine confidence, how uncertainty should be handled, and what reporting formats make results more actionable. In practice, this can involve topics like harmonizing assumptions across pathways, improving transparency and reproducibility, incorporating scale-up realities, and ensuring that SOT metrics reflect what matters for deployment.

From an administrative standpoint, the opportunity is listed under the DOE Golden Field Office, categorized as discretionary, and associated with the Energy activity area under CFDA 81.087. Eligibility is described as unrestricted, meaning any type of entity could submit information (industry, universities, national labs, government agencies, and other stakeholders), as long as they follow the instructions in the RFI. Importantly, there are no expected awards and no funding attached to this notice, and fields like an "award ceiling" are not meaningful in the way they would be for a real grant solicitation.

Responses were required to be submitted by email to FY22ConversionRFI@ee.doe.gov no later than 5:00 PM Eastern Time on March 11, 2022. DOE required submissions as attachments to an email in Microsoft Word (.docx) format, limited to six pages, using 12-point font and one-inch margins. Only electronic responses were accepted, and DOE recommended compressing files larger than 25 MB (for example, by zipping) to improve deliverability. The full RFI text and any additional formatting or content guidance were provided through the EERE Exchange site at https://eere-exchange.energy.gov/.

Overall, DE-FOA-0002657 is best understood as DOE's effort to collect grounded, experience-based input on where bioconversion organisms and catalytic systems fail in practice, and how BETO can prioritize R&D and analytical benchmarking so that future work targets the most consequential robustness and performance bottlenecks in bioenergy conversion pathways.

• The Department of Energy, Golden Field Office in the energy sector is offering a public funding opportunity titled "DE-FOA-0002657" and is now available to receive applicants.
• Interested and eligible applicants and submit their applications by referencing the CFDA number(s): 81.087.
• This funding opportunity was created on Feb 01, 2022.
• Applicants must submit their applications by Mar 11, 2022. (Agency may still review applications by suitable applicants for the remaining/unused allocated funding in 2026.)
• Each selected applicant is eligible to receive up to $2.00 in funding.
• Eligible applicants include: Unrestricted (i.e., open to any type of entity above), subject to any clarification in text field entitled Additional Information on Eligibility.

Apply for DE FOA 0002657

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