The Chronicle Of Higher Education
04-12-07
With Big Money Flowing to Biofuels Research, Universities Vie to Harvest Energy
From Crops
By JEFFREY BRAINARD
Ames, Iowa
On an overcast, chilly day in late March, scraggly rows of experimental crops line
the test plots here at Iowa State University's research farm.
Corn is king in Iowa, both as a food grain and now as a focus of efforts to rev up
the biofuel industry. But these plants bear less-familiar names: switch grass,
miscanthus, and kenaf.
The brown and black stalks are not much to look at, having weathered Iowa's
winter snows. But Iowa State researchers see these crops as seeds of change in
alternative fuels. By summer, the grasses will be lush, tall, and green.
Researchers and policy makers agree that corn kernels alone will not help slake
the growing appetite in America and throughout the world for energy. Scientists
also concur that the promise of "biorenewable energy" can be fully harvested
only if they can figure out how to wring cheap fuel from the stalks and leaves of
corn and other plants, and not just from the energy-rich seeds.
Scientists in academe and in industry are beginning to do just that. American
universities, especially a handful of land-grant institutions in the Midwest, will play
a major role in determining whether those efforts succeed.
Success will require rapid, fundamental advances across many disciplines.
Indeed, many observers concede there is a risk of overhyping the promise of
biomass fuels. President Bush has asked for significant progress within 10 years
-- a short time span in fundamental research. And little has resulted from other
bold energy-research promises, such as hydrogen-fueled cars, fusion power, and
"synfuels," a federal program begun in 1980 to derive gasoline alternatives from
coal.
What's more, the intensive cultivation of crops for bioenergy could cause
unintended environmental consequences, like increased soil erosion, or a
reduction in the acreage available for growing food, which might result in higher
grocery prices, especially in developing countries that depend on U.S. exports.
But those risks have not stopped industry and the federal government from
pouring more money into biofuels research, including some of the largest single
grants ever given to academe. Stanford University and the University of
California at Berkeley have each received grants of several hundred million
dollars in recent years. And on Tuesday, Iowa State announced that it had
landed $22.5-million over eight years from the ConocoPhillips Company (The
Chronicle, April 11).
Business and government experts envision crops that could turn green into gold
for depressed economies in rural areas, reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, and
even transform U.S. security policy.
"This train is moving very, very fast, not just at Iowa State but across our entire
country," Iowa State's president, Gregory L. Geoffroy, said at a recent town
meeting on the campus. "Part of the problem is to keep up with it and not do
damage along the way that creates long-term problems."
The Corn and the Green
As fundamental research on biomass fuel gears up, giant distilleries to convert
corn to ethanol for automobile fuel are sprouting up all over Iowa and the
Midwest, brewing more pure-grain alcohol than the biggest fraternity bash ever
imagined.
Corn has gotten the most attention as a biofuel source, but not necessarily
because it is the most sustainable or renewable resource. Production of cornbased ethanol is booming in Iowa, the nation's leading producer, in large part
because ethanol is a viable replacement for an environmentally harmful gasoline
additive that most states have banned. In addition, California, the nation's most
populous state, is pushing increased use of ethanol as one way to satisfy a state
law, enacted last fall, that requires a 25-percent reduction in greenhouse gases
by 2020.
But corn-based ethanol is hardly pure green: It yields only marginally more
energy than the fossil fuels necessary to produce it. Burning ethanol results in
only slightly less carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases than is emitted by
the gasoline it replaces.
Demands on the Midwestern corn supply may also prove problematic. Since
Iowa's corn grain is also a major source of animal feed and food additives, the
state's farmers would have to plant more corn or farm existing land more
intensively to keep up. Either option may increase both soil depletion and
environmental damage from fertilizer runoff.
So high hopes are riding on crops like switch grass, a native prairie grass, and
miscanthus, a relative of sugar cane that grows in dense stands that can reach
14 feet in height. But those crops have been studied little. Among the key issues
that researchers must examine are how much biomass the crops can yield when
farmed intensively, and how much fertilizer is needed for optimal yields, says
Kendall R. Lamkey, chairman of Iowa State's department of agronomy.
Flat spending by the federal government on renewable-energy research is partly
to blame for the lack of progress in the field. Oil prices plunged in the mid-1980s,
leading federal agencies that support research to focus elsewhere.
Now, however, continued unrest in the Middle East, the Iraq war, and the spike in
energy prices since 2005 have renewed attention on the issue. Money is flowing
into fundamental research faster than September corn fills a grain elevator.
In February the international energy company BP announced an unprecedented
grant of $500-million ($50-million a year for 10 years) to a consortium led by
Berkeley and including the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
It was the largest industry grant for university research ever. The sheer size of
the award, however, has prompted Berkeley faculty members to raise questions
about how much control the corporate sponsor will wield over the research (The
Chronicle, April 13).
Iowa State, which was on a team that was a finalist for the BP grant, said last
week that its deal with ConocoPhillips, the nation's third-largest energy company,
appears to be among the largest industry grants to a university specifically for
biofuels research. (Stanford announced in 2002 that it would receive $225-million
over 10 years from the Exxon Mobil Corporation and two other sponsors for a
variety of research on renewable energy sources, including biofuels.)
Greenback Harvest
The federal government promises to put up big bucks as well. This year the
Department of Energy will award three grants for basic-research centers, each
totaling $125-million, or $25-million a year for five years. The grants will be
among the largest single federal research grants to academe ever.
The competition for the government money has triggered a rush among
universities to create more multi-institutional teams like the one financed by BP.
Ten to 20 teams have applied, Raymond L. Orbach, director of the department's
Office of Science, said in testimony to Congress in February.
The budget for another Energy Department biomass-research program has
nearly doubled, to almost $200-million, in 2007. But last year the agency gave a
total of only about $18-million to academic institutions through peer-reviewed
grants for this work. The other money flowed to the department's national
laboratories, corporations, and to recipients, some of them universities, of
noncompetitive Congressional earmarks.
The agency's total funds this year for biomass research, including the money for
the fundamental-research centers, represent only about 0.2 percent of total
federal spending on research and development. The Agriculture Department's
research spending on biomass for fuels is minuscule as well, at about $5-million.
"For a country that says we're serious about ethanol from biorenewables, we
sure aren't acting like it," said Mr. Lamkey, the Iowa State agronomist.
Research on biofuels has a strong advocate in President Bush, who has taken a
personal interest. The former oilman raised eyebrows when he mentioned switch
grass in his State of the Union address in 2006. Then, late in February of this
year, he met at the White House with five leading academic scientists in biofuels
research for two hours, double the meeting's scheduled duration. For Mr. Bush, it
was a rare amount of face time with academics. He came already well informed
on the topic, several scientists said afterward.
"The president said that this is going to be a major effort for the rest of his
presidency," said one attendee, Stephen P. Long, a professor of crop sciences at
the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Some critics, however, see Mr. Bush's interest as a way for him to avoid tougher
alternatives -- which might lower reliance on foreign oil sooner -- like further
raising federal vehicle-mileage standards or investing in federal programs that
encourage energy conservation.
Despite widespread interest among some states in becoming the nation's next
leading ethanol producer, so far few have committed significant money to
academic research. Iowa's governor, Chet Culver, a Democrat, has made one of
the largest such proposals in any state: $100-million over four years for a variety
of projects to promote biofuels and other sources of renewable energy, which he
said could make his state "the Silicon Valley of the Midwest."
Iowa's legislature is considering the proposal, but it is unclear how much of the
money would go to peer-reviewed research at universities. Some lawmakers
want to earmark the funds for specific projects, including demonstration plants to
test new methods for processing ethanol.
Systematic Progress
Proponents of a focus on basic research into biomass fuels observe that much of
the public and corporate research spending to date has focused on improving the
efficiency of factory methods for producing ethanol. However, many researchers
argue that government and industry have neglected the fundamental studies in
genetics and agronomy necessary to produce large quantities of "cellulosic"
ethanol, or fuel developed from the cellulose in plant material, and to supplant
corn grain as the main feedstock.
Lee R. Lynd, a professor of engineering at Dartmouth College, says he and other
basic researchers "have felt like the field was acting as if we were two years
away from cellulosic ethanol for the past 20 years," if only certain factoryproduction challenges were solved.
Again and again, scientists at Iowa State and elsewhere say success in
producing cellulosic ethanol economically will require the help of scholars from a
variety of fields. The researchers will need to work together on a diverse but
interconnected set of problems covering the full cycle of production, from growing
crops to processing them for fuel and other industrial products, like
biodegradable replacements for plastics. Universities have begun tilling some
specialty areas of research, but the most-successful programs and universities
will probably support interdisciplinary efforts, whether on their campuses or with
partners.
Berkeley won the BP grant because of its strengths in managing large,
interdisciplinary research projects and in molecular biology, which scientists want
to use to genetically engineer plants useful as biofuels.
Iowa State was able to attract its corporate partner in part because the university
is developing an interdisciplinary effort. Its biorenewables program -- started in
2001, before the current hype -- includes 145 faculty members in 18 departments
across five colleges, including design, economics, natural-resource ecology, and
statistics.
"I've never seen a project here bring such a diverse group of people together
from different disciplines who normally don't talk to each other," said Lawrence A.
Johnson, a professor of food science and human nutrition.
But Iowa State has also carved out a niche: ConocoPhillips picked the university
in large part because it has developed one of the country's few programs in
"thermoconversion" of crops to fuel, a method that involves vaporizing biofuels to
create gases that can in turn be processed to create liquid fuel.
Iowa State has also tried to compensate for its lack of an established program in
biological conversion. That process uses microbes and enzymes to break down
stubborn plant cellulose into less-complex sugars that can be fermented into
ethanol.
In its application for one of the Energy Department's big new research-center
grants, the university proposed an intriguing partnership: Besides its institutional
partner, the University of California at San Diego, it joined with Synthetic
Genomics Inc., based in Rockville, Md. That company, which was founded by the
maverick scientist J. Craig Venter, a leader in the successful effort to map the
human genome, is working on designing microbes that could generate biofuels
without the use of crops. That approach would offer the benefit of avoiding the
use of petroleum-heavy fertilizers and other methods to increase crop yields.
Universities are scrambling to set up programs in biological conversion, which
some observers say is leading to bidding wars for top scientists and the graduate
students they have trained.
Other potentially fertile fields of research have also attracted attention. Auburn
University, for example, is studying the production of fuels from wood chips and
trees; forests cover 70 percent of Alabama. The university is also among those
studying the use of manure as a fuel source.
Mowing Down the Hurdles
There are many reasons, however, not to bet the farm that biofuels will quickly
and easily solve America's energy needs. Researchers must overcome a number
of obstacles.
Plants have evolved thick cell walls over millions of years to resist efforts by
micro-organisms to break them down. Existing processes to create cellulosic
ethanol involve treating plant material with acid and heat to make it easier to free
up the sugars, which can then be fermented.
Because of low federal financing to date, "there's less than 10 of us nationwide
that have devoted any sustained attention to this question," says Bruce E. Dale,
a professor of chemical engineering and materials science at Michigan State
University.
Scientists at Iowa State and elsewhere plan to develop plants, through
conventional breeding or genetic engineering, that are programmed to begin
breaking down their own cellulose just before harvesting. Iowa State may have
an advantage in such work because its scientists -- among them Patrick S.
Schnable, director of the university's Center for Plant Genomics -- are
participating in a federally financed project to sequence corn's genome.
The genetic-engineering route, however, is likely to raise concerns among some
environmentalists that modified genes could jump from corn plants into other
crops.
Policy and management challenges exist, too. Corn-based ethanol is competitive
with gasoline, and cheaper than cellulosic ethanol, in large part because of a
federal subsidy of 51 cents a gallon given to petroleum companies that blend
ethanol into the gasoline they sell, to encourage the development of the ethanol
industry. University officials say the government might have to subsidize
cellulosic ethanol for the market to accept it. But increasing farm subsidies is
politically controversial in Washington.
A large expansion of agricultural cultivation in America is expected to raise
pressure to cultivate croplands that are not farmed because they are
environmentally sensitive or highly vulnerable to erosion. About 37 million acres
of such land, protected by a federal conservation program, comprise important
wildlife habitats.
The strategy for using those and other lands to grow more crops for biofuels, say
academic scientists, is to identify through research how to maximize yields while
minimizing environmental disruption.
Biofuel advocates were given hope in December by a paper published in the
journal Science, describing work done by a team led by G. David Tilman, an
ecologist at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. The researchers studied
diverse mixtures of native perennial grasses and other flowering plants grown on
degraded cropland. They found that those plots provided 51 percent more usable
energy per acre than ethanol from corn grown on fertile land. The diverse mix
also provided 238 percent more energy, on average, than did the same land
planted with single species, like switch grass.
Another big plus was that fuels made from the diverse plantings were "carbon
negative": They reduced atmospheric carbon dioxide, by storing more carbon in
their roots and soil than was released by the fossil fuels needed to grow and
convert them into biofuels. Ethanol from corn is carbon positive, meaning that its
production adds carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, although less than fossil fuels
do.
Diverse stands of crops also would retain more value as wildlife habitat than the
alternatives, the Minnesota study suggested.
Despite such encouraging results, other scholars paint a gloomier picture: that
cultivation of crops for fuel will inevitably reduce the world's food supply. By 2050,
worldwide population is expected to have increased by 50 percent.
Academic scientists and engineers continue to believe, however, that research
will allow them to find solutions to these concerns in ways not yet possible to
predict -- and that in so doing, they will help cultivate a revolution in agriculture.
Mr. Geoffroy, Iowa State's president, laid out those big dreams when he told the
town meeting on his campus that he envisioned nothing less than that the
university, and the state, could become the world's "epicenter" of this research.
"Iowa," he said, "is on the cusp of one of the biggest changes in its history, and
we need to help Iowa get ready for it."