Drive to make biofuels thrive

Drive to make biofuels thrive
By Janis Mara Staff Writer
Posted: 07/09/2009

BERKELEY — In 10 to 12 years, drivers in the Bay Area and around the country may zoom along powered by fuel made from pecan shells, switchgrass or even poplar trees thanks to research at Bay Area universities funded by more than $700 million in grants.

Of course, as the price of gas hovers close to the $3 mark at local gas stations, a time span that long may seem interminable, especially considering the amount of money awarded to UC Berkeley, UC Davis and others.

But the real challenge facing researchers, and the time-consuming issue, is breaking down tough cell walls to get at the sugar in plants to make it into fuel.

It's easy to access the sugar in an ear of corn. Other plants, not so much. Just consider that it takes a cow all day chewing its cud and then deploying four stomachs to turn grass into fuel. Not to mention the byproducts; methane from cow belches is a major cause of pollution in California.

The oil companies picking up the research tab don't seem fazed by long timelines.

"It's a process that's going to take time," said Alex Yelland of Chevron, which gave $25 million to UC Davis to study biofuels. "We are trying to speed the process of moving from the lab to pilot production. That's why we have spread our research and development across many institutions. But it does take a number of years," Yelland said.

"The policy for advanced biofuels should be looked at as a longer-term play. To be fair, they (researchers) are trying to do things that never have been done in a short period of time," said Todd Taylor, who leads the biofuels group at the law firm Fredrikson & Byron in Minneapolis and contributes to publications including Ethanol Producer magazine.

"The problem with cellulosic ethanol made from plants is that it's made of sugar, but it's not accessible. Finding the technologies to do it has been expensive."

Huge grants, mostly from major oil companies, may well do the trick. UC Berkeley has scored $350 million from energy giant BP in 2006 along with two other universities. A coalition headed by Lawrence Berkeley Lab got $125 million from the Department of Energy in 2007. UC Davis snagged $25 million from San Ramon-based Chevron in 2006 and Stanford University got $225 million in 2002 for broad-based energy research including biofuel projects from ExxonMobil.

Researchers say plant-based fuels nurtured by these efforts could be widely available at the pump in ten to 12 years at a cost comparable to that of gasoline.

"A cotton shirt is pure cellulose," said Chris Somerville, director of UC Berkeley's Energy Biosciences Institute, created by the BP grant, of the myriad possibilities. "You could be giving the shirt off your back someday to power your car."

Drivers in California and much of the U.S. are already using corn-based ethanol, a biofuel that makes up 10 percent of every gallon pumped in this state. In 2008, some 9 billion gallons of ethanol were produced in the U.S.

Critics say growing corn for fuel displaces food crops, causing worldwide food shortages, and turning corn into ethanol burns up almost as much energy as it produces. Though the federal government has mandated that producers must supply 36 billion gallons of biofuel annually by 2022, no more than 15 billion gallons of that can be corn ethanol by 2015.

So in labs throughout the Bay Area and the nation, centrifuges are spinning, plants are sprouting and latex-gloved researchers are hustling to produce so-called second generation biofuels from byproducts like sawdust, or from plants that grow on marginal land.

After getting set up in various locations on campus, UC Berkeley's Energy Biosciences Institute is currently analyzing rumen from cow stomachs to reverse-engineer the process by which the bacteria break down plant cell walls to turn grass into energy. "We're analyzing termite guts as well," Somerville said. "We're also going into compost heaps to identify novel fungi. Next we figure out which one does the best job and try to replicate the process."

It's pretty much guaranteed that the institute's discoveries will be put to use in the real world. BP is building a plant in Florida that will use fuel derived from sugar cane, Somerville said. "Our task is to tell them how to tweak the process to do it better."

In Emeryville, the employees of the 66,000-square-foot Joint BioEnergy Institute "grow the (plants), harvest them, hand them to the deconstruction team to convert into sugar and then to the fuel synthesis team to make into fuel," said Blake Simmons, head of the institution's deconstruction division.

The organization, created by the $125 million Energy Department grant, plans to patent its discoveries and make them available for commercial use within ten to 12 years at prices comparable to gasoline.

Somerville and Simmons' institutes are studying bioconversion, meaning biological processes like digestion to access sugars. While UC Davis is researching this process, the university is also looking at using heat to turn plants into gases that then become liquid, like crude oil, when cooled.

"We can take biomass and instead of breaking it down into sugars and fermenting the sugars into alcohol, we can heat the biomass and break it down into simpler compounds," said Bryan Jenkins, director of the UC Davis Energy Institute.

Stanford University is researching subjects including "how to deal with lignins, the tough, woody parts of plant structures, because that's an area that has received less attention than going from cellulose to sugars," said Lynn Orr, former project director of the Global Climate and Energy Project.

About a half-dozen of the project's 40-odd assignments, funded by a $225 million grant from entities including ExxonMobil, focus on biofuels. Also, Stanford's Program on Food Security and the Environment is studying the effects of biofuels on poor people, funded by a $3.8 million grant from the Gates Foundation.

Attorney Taylor was optimistic about the research going on in the Bay Area.

"The university system of California has a good reputation of getting technology out to be commercialized." Taylor said he believes cellulosic ethanol can help make America independent of foreign oil.

"The U.S. economy will recover, just like every other economy, and when that happens there will be resource competition and it will drive the price (of gas) up. The only resource we can actively control is a bio-based fuel."

Echoing Taylor, Somerville said, "You can see that oil prices are going up permanently. There's concern on the other hand about continuing to burn fossil fuel because of damage to the planet, and people have concerns about being dependent on unstable countries around the world for energy." For these reasons, cellulosic ethanol could turn out to be the fuel driving the country's declaration of oil independence.

Reach Janis Mara at 925-952-2671 or jmara@bayareanewsgroup.com.

Grants for local biofuel research
Taxpayers' money:
-Department of Energy: $125 million to a coalition headed by Lawrence Berkeley Lab to develop commercial alternatives to corn ethanol
Private funds: Three energy giants divided up the Bay Area
-BP: $350 million over ten years to UC Berkeley, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of Illinois to study biofuels
-Chevron: $25 million to UC Davis to study biofuels
-ExxonMobil and other partners: $225 million for energy research including some biofuel projects to Stanford University in Palo Alto (Gates Foundation also awarded $3.8 million to study effects of biofuel on the poor)