Drive to make biofuels thrive

Drive to make biofuels thrive

By Janis Mara
Staff Writer


Energy Biosciences Institute Director Chris Somerville holds a handful of... ( KRISTOPHER SKINNER )

By Janis Mara

jmara@bayareanewsgroup.com

BERKELEY — Within the next decade, drivers in the Bay Area and around the country may get around powered by fuel made from pecan shells, switch grass or even poplar trees, thanks to research at Bay Area universities funded by more than $700 million in grants.

And researchers say the plant-based fuels nurtured by these efforts could be widely available at the pump at a cost comparable to gasoline, but better for the environment.

Of course, as the price of gas hovers close to the $3 mark at local gas stations, that long wait may seem interminable.

"It's a process that's going to take time," said Alex Yelland of Chevron, which gave $25 million to the University of California-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 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.

"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," said Todd Taylor, who leads the biofuels group at the law firm Fredrikson & Byron in Minneapolis and contributes
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to publications including Ethanol Producer magazine.

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

"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," Taylor said.

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, about 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, 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," said Chris Somerville, director of the institute. "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."

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 10 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 Exxon Mobil, 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 biobased 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.

# Department of Energy: $125 million to a coalition headed by Lawrence Berkeley Lab to develop commercial alternatives to corn ethanol.

# BP: $350 million over 10 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.
# Exxon Mobil 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.)