Scientists develop open-source software to analyze economics of biofuels, bioproducts

Perennial grasses can be converted into everything from ethanol to bioplastics, but it’s unclear which bioproducts hold the greatest potential. BioSTEAM, a new open-source simulation software package in Python gives scientists, engineers, biotechnology companies, and funding agencies a fast, flexible tool to analyze the economics of producing different biofuels and bioproducts — in a matter of seconds.