New York Times
06-26-07
U.S. Is Creating 3 Centers for Research on Biofuels
By MATTHEW L. WALD
WASHINGTON, June 25 — The Energy Department is creating three bioenergy
research centers to find new ways to turn plants into fuel.
The three centers, which the department described as three start-up companies
with $125 million each in capital, will be in Oak Ridge, Tenn.; Madison, Wis.; and
near Berkeley, Calif. They will involve numerous universities, national
laboratories and private companies. The goal of the centers, which are to be
announced on Tuesday, is to bring new technologies to market within five years.
The new approach supports President Bush’s goal of reducing gasoline
consumption by 20 percent in 10 years.
The bioenergy centers will focus on finding naturally occurring microbes that can
break down lignin, a component of plants and trees, to give access to the
material inside, called cellulose. The cellulose can be converted into ethanol or
other liquid fuels, like butanol and biodiesel, said Raymond L. Orbach, the under
secretary for science at the Energy Department.
Today, companies trying to commercialize cellulosic ethanol use heat and acids,
an expensive process.
They have focused on the cellulose itself, which is made up of six-carbon sugars,
the kind that is found in grains that have been turned into fermented products like
beer for thousands of years, and of five-carbon sugars, which cannot be
fermented by ordinary means. These are bound together tightly, and must be
loosened by biological processes.
“There has been tremendous progress,” Dr. Orbach said. “But if you don’t fix the
front end, the back end isn’t going be very efficient.”
The centers will also work on creating new crops that produce lignin that is easier
to deal with, he said.
Ethanol is increasingly used as a gasoline substitute, but that has driven up the
price of corn. “There’s a lot of biomass in our country that has nothing to do with
corn or any other food,” Dr. Orbach said in an interview. One such plentiful plant
often mentioned is switch grass.
In another area, the department announced Monday that it would help establish
laboratories in Texas and Massachusetts to test designs for wind turbine blades
up to 300 feet long, about twice the length of blades now in common use. The
size of wind turbines in use has tripled in the last five years and could triple
again, but this would require blades of lighter materials that are three times the
length of the longest blade that can be reliably tested now in this country, said
Andrew Karsner, assistant secretary for energy efficiency and renewable energy.
The two announcements are part of a highly public campaign by the Bush
administration to stress its commitment to renewable energy.
One of the new bioenergy centers will be led by the Oak Ridge National
Laboratory, an Energy Department lab in Tennessee. Participants include
another lab, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Golden, Colo.; the
Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta; the University of Georgia, Athens, and
the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
A Great Lakes center, in Madison, Wis., will be led by the University of
Wisconsin, and will include Michigan State University, East Lansing; the Pacific
Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, Wash.; the Lucigen Corporation,
Middleton, Wis.; the University of Florida, Gainesville; Oak Ridge National
Laboratory; Illinois State University, Normal; and Iowa State University, Ames.
The third, the Joint Bioenergy Institute, will be led by the Lawrence Berkeley
National Laboratory in California, and will include Sandia National Laboratories;
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; the University of California, Berkeley;
the University of California, Davis; and Stanford. Dr. Orbach said that the centers’
geographic diversity would help researchers examine a wide range of plants.
The centers, each to be financed by $25 million a year, are supposed to be fully
operational by the fiscal year beginning Sept. 1, 2009.