Chronicle of Higher Education
06-27-07
Several Universities Are Among Major Partners on New Federal Biofuel Grants
By MATT PETRIE
Washington
Several universities will be major partners in three new research centers on
bioenergy, the U.S. Department of Energy announced on Tuesday. The centers,
which involve researchers from a total of 18 universities, along with seven
national laboratories and several corporate partners, will each receive $125million over five years to study new techniques for producing ethanol and other
biofuels.
The University of Wisconsin at Madison will lead one of the centers, with the
State of Wisconsin providing an additional $54-million for a new building and new
faculty positions. Michigan State University, which will receive about $50-million
of the federal grant, will be a major collaborator in the Wisconsin center. Other
academic partners will be Illinois State University, Iowa State University, and
the University of Florida.
Another center will be led by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in Tennessee.
Its academic partners will include the University of Tennessee, which is
scheduled to receive an additional $3-million to $5-million from the state
government for new faculty positions to support the research. Other academic
partners in the Oak Ridge center are Dartmouth College, the Georgia Institute of
Technology, and the University of Georgia.
A third center, located in the San Francisco Bay area, will be led by the Lawrence
Berkeley National Laboratory, with Stanford University and the University of
California campuses at Berkeley and Davis as academic partners.
Those three consortia beat out more than a dozen applicants for the grants,
whose proposals were evaluated by a panel of 32 scientists from around the
world.
At a news conference on Tuesday, the centers' program directors and
Department of Energy officials described the planned research as an ambitious
attempt to overcome obstacles that have prevented ethanol from becoming a
viable alternative energy source on a mass scale. They likened the scientific
endeavor to that of mapping the human genome or landing on the moon.
Timothy Donahue, the principal investigator for the Wisconsin center, said the
centers were embarking on a "grand scientific mission."
Energy Secretary Samuel W. Bodman described the grants as a "high risk"
investment, but said that the research could "change the way we think about
biotechnology" if successful.
Much of the research of the new centers will focus on methods for developing
fuels from the cellulose in plant material, rather than from food grains such as
corn kernels. Researchers will seek new methods of breaking down cellulose, the
material that forms the walls of plant cells, into sugars for ethanol fermentation.
The amount of energy presently required to produce ethanol from food grains is
too high for it to be economically viable as a mass-scale fuel.
Mr. Donahue described much of the research as "bioprospecting" -- searching for
plants that can be more easily broken down than corn stalks, or for enzymes that
are efficient at deconstructing plant matter. Scientists will also seek to develop
plants with cell walls that break down more easily and more potent enzymes.
The universities involved in the centers include most of those with wellestablished research programs in biofuels, and some of the institutions have
already received hefty grants from industry for the work (The Chronicle, April 20).
Most notably, the energy company BP promised in December to give the
University of California at Berkeley $500-million over 10 years (The Chronicle,
February 16). In the past year, the University of California at Davis, Georgia
Tech, and Iowa State University have also made deals with corporate sponsors.
Although Stanford and Berkeley already are conducting corporate-backed
research, those programs will remain separate from the universities' participation
in research at the new federally supported center, said Jay Keasling, the principal
investigator for the California center.