The Berkeley Daily Planet
06-29-07
Berkeley Lab Wins Federal Biofuel Grant
y Richard Brenneman
Berkeley’s bid to become the biofuel research capital of academic and corporate
America scored another major advance Tuesday, winning funds to start a second
lab.
U.S. Secretary of Energy Samuel Bodman awarded $125 million to a coalition
headed by the University of California’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
(LBNL) to create one of three national bioenergy research centers.
Funds will target development of genetically modified plants and microbes to
transform cellulose—the basic building block of plant walls—into fuels.
The ultimate goal is to create energy independence, with the nation reaping its
harvest of crops grown on American soil.
While the project is separate from the $500 million Energy Biosciences Institute
(EBI) funded earlier this year by BP (the company once called British Petroleum),
the newly funded Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) features many of the same
scientific players—and both are headed by Jay Keasling, a chemical engineering
professor and entrepreneur.
The announcement was met by criticism from some researchers. “It is very
disconcerting to see such an overwhelming concentration of research in the
hands of scientists whose ideas are not only wrong but dangerous,” said Ignacio
Chapela, a UC Berkeley plant microbial ecologist and a leading critic of the
increasing ties between the corporate and academic worlds.
Washington announcement
Bodman made the formal announcement to reporters gathered at the National
Press Club. LBNL’s Keasling stood alongside the Bush Administration cabinet
officer as one of three winning project directors.
All three centers will focus on genetic engineering as a way to create new crops
along with new microbes and newly discovered enzymes to design a more
efficient process for converting plants into fuels for cars, trucks and airplanes.
Keasling say he hoped that the Joint BioEnergy Institute—or JBEI, “jay-bay as
we call it”—would trigger the start of a new wave of green biotechnological
industry in the Bay Area and across the country.
The Berkeley scientist will lead a partnership headed by his lab in partnership
with the Berkeley-affiliated Sandia and Lawrence Livermore national laboratories
along with UC’s Berkeley and Davis campuses and Stanford University.
While Bodman said he was barred from saying just how many applications he
had received for the three slots, applicants were narrowed to a list numbering “in
the teens,” with the winners picked by an international panel of scientists,
technologists and figures from the corporate and non-profit realms.
The Bioenergy Science Center is the name for the winning project for a lab to be
led by Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. Other partners are Georgia
Institute of Technology; University of Georgia, Athens; University of Tennessee,
Knoxville, and the DOE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden,
Colo.
The third winner, the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center, is headed by the
University of Wisconsin in Madison. Other partners are: the Pacific Northwest
National Laboratory in Richland, Wash.; University of Florida, Gainesville; Illinois
State University, Normal; Iowa State University, Ames, and the only corporate
partner among the winners, Lucigen Corporation of MIddleton, Wis.
Each lab will receive up to $25 million annually for five years.
“We don’t know exactly what will happen, but I’ve got great confidence,” said
Bodman, that the intellectual prowess of the researchers “will lead to great
things.”
The result, he said, will be “a total change in the way we power our homes and
our vehicles.”
GMO linkage
To make the linkage between the grants and genetics research explicit, DOE
Under Secretary for Science Raymond Orbach told reporters that “seven years
ago to this day,” the National Institutes of Health and the DOE announced
sequencing of the human genome.
“That gave us the technological expertise to bring genomics” into the search for
new sources of biofuels, Orbach said, and his department “is using genomics to
meet this critical need of this nation and our world.”
Martin Keller of the Oak Ridge center said one of the goals of their research
would be manipulating the genes in cellulose to make the tissue more
degradable. “We really want to change how biofuels are made in the next five
years,” he said.
Timothy Donahue, director of the Wisconsin project, said researchers had been
handed “the largest political, economic and scientific challenge of our time,” with
his team located in the heart of the nation’s greatest source of biomass, the
Great Lakes Basin.
Donahue said his team “will have the lead in the way” wood chips and grasses
are used to produce biofuels by harvesting microbial and chemical technologies.
Keasling said JBEI will focus on:
• Developing new “feedstock” (plants) to provide richer sources of biofuels;
• Scavenging the environment for enzymes better capable of breaking down plant
materials into sugars, the basic fermentation stock used in making fuels;
• Developing organisms capable of producing higher levels of ethanol as well as
“the next generation of biofuels” for uses ranging from diesels to jets, and
• Developing and refining so-called “cross-cutting technologies,” processes that
cut across the different phases and specialties involved in biofuel research and
production with a goal of providing techniques for the emerging biofuel industry.
Keasling said JBEI “will operate much like a start-up company with dynamic
allocation of resources” to respond to developments as they arise.
Chapela was far less optimistic. “I no longer hesitate to use the word fascism,” he
said. “That is the idea that we have no difference between the state, the scientific
establishment and the corporations. They have finally come into complete
alignment, leaving no opportunity for diversity of thought and creativity.”
Both EBI and JBEI were enthusiastically backed by local government, including
Berkeley’s Mayor Tom Bates, as well as by UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert
Birgeneau. The JBEI proposal was aided by the San Francisco East Bay
Economic Development Alliance for Business, a quiet but powerful alliance of
corporations and local politicians.
Chapela had been denied tenure after his outspoken critique of the Novartis
agreement, an earlier UC Berkeley/corporate pact, and won his position only
after filing a lawsuit.
Starting next month, he will be gone from the Berkeley campus for a year, taking
a sabattical with the Institute of Gene Ecology in Promso, Norway. “I will not lose
track of what’s happening here,” he said. “I will remain engaged.”
Geo-petro-politics
One reporter asked the Energy Secretary about that morning’s announcement
that ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips had broken off talks with the Venezuelan oil
ministry over demands that the U.S.-based firms grant a majority share of
revenues to the government.
“It’s not a happy thing for Venezuela,” said Bodman, adding that American
companies also have problems with Nigeria and Russia.
He said the administration has “encouraged all countries with indigenous
supplies to have laws that will encourage non-indigenous companies to
participate in developing their resources.”
Unmentioned was the fact that two companies with strong local ties—EBI-funder
BP and Richmond refinery owner ChevronTexaco—have signed agreement with
the Venezuelan ministry.
A non-UC center
While the largest share of the local biofuel funding pie has been sliced off for the
UC labs, there’s another DOE recipient in Albany.
Two other grants announced earlier this month went to research at the U.S.
Department of Agriculture’s Western Research Center in Albany.
Both projects were awarded $600,000 to study the genetics of grasses being
considered as possible sources for biofuels derived from cellulose.
One involves the creation of genetically modified varieties of a variety called
Purple False Brome, while the second will provide a more detailed investigation
of the genes of switchgrass.
One project already underway in the lab is involved in a search for biofuel
producing enzymes which can be engineered to create more efficient microbes
for biofuel production.
Two other Albany projects are aimed at using wheat as a source of biofuel, using
the starches to produce ethanol, while another is looking at a whole range of
biofuel issues through the lens of genomics.
Another Albany project is concerned not with fuel but with finding new ways to
engineer crops for domestic production of natural rubber.