Wall Street Journal
07-10-07
Alternate-Fuel Hunt Gives Plant Biologist a Lift
By MALIA WOLLAN
Stephen Long has spent his career studying grass, in particular a sugarcane-like
grass called Miscanthus X giganteus. But until this year, the University of Illinois
biologist had difficulty getting research grants and could count on one hand the
invitations he received annually to make presentations at academic conferences.
Then in February, Mr. Long was one of two plant biologists invited to the White
House to brief President Bush on how plants like Miscanthus might begin
replacing foreign oil. That same month, energy giant BP PLC announced a $500
million grant to the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to develop
fuels made from plant materials. Mr. Long was named acting deputy director of
the project, called the Energy Biosciences Institute.
[photo]
Stephen Long speaks, flanked by Illinois Lt. Gov. Pat Quinn, right
Now Mr. Long says he gets more academic-conference invitations than he could
possibly accept -- more than 50 a year, some from as far away as Australia and
Japan. He's also inundated with calls and emails from prospective students
interested in studying plants. "When I tell people what I do, they don't think I'm
crazy," adds the 56-year-old.
Spurred by high oil prices and concern over greenhouse gases, the push for
alternative fuels like plant-based cellulosic ethanol is putting plant biologists at
the forefront of energy exploration. Unlike corn-based ethanol, which is made
from fermented sugars, cellulosic ethanol is made by breaking down cellulose,
the fibrous carbon-based molecules that give plants structure. Plant biologists
are crucial to identifying and engineering a high-yield, drought-resistant plant and
an efficient, cost-effective method of breaking down plant cellulose into biofuels.
Cellulosic ethanol can be made from such plant materials as rice straw, wood
chips, switchgrass, poplar trees and Miscanthus.
The problem is that energy companies like BP, Chevron Corp. and
ConocoPhillips -- traditionally populated by geologists and petroleum engineers -largely lack the scientific skills to create a biofuel. As a result, the companies are
now pouring money into universities, hoping to tap the ivory tower for plant
biologists, as well as for chemical engineers, molecular biologists, agronomists
and geneticists. In April, ConocoPhillips established a $22.5 million biofuels
research program at Iowa State University. Chevron has given more than $60
million to such schools as the University of California, Davis, and Texas A&M for
biofuels research in the past few years.
"The whole intersection of biology and energy is unexplored territory," says
Steven Koonin, chief scientist at London-based BP. "Universities are the best
places for that research." While BP has fewer than four biological scientists on its
staff of 97,000, Mr. Koonin says he expects to hire around 50 in the next two
years.
Big energy companies aren't the only ones recruiting plant biologists.
Biotechnology companies like Mendel Biotechnology Inc. in Hayward, Calif., and
Ceres Inc. in Thousand Oaks, Calif., are also working to commercialize plant
breeds, seeds and enzymes for breaking down plant cellulose, and they are
hiring. So, too, is the government: In February, the Department of Energy
committed $385 million over four years to building six cellulosic ethanol
refineries. Last month, the department announced an additional $375 million
investment in three new Bioenergy Research Centers to develop biofuels.
All of this is a turnaround for plant biologists, who haven't been in the spotlight
since the Green Revolution in the 1940s and 1950s, when newly engineered,
high-yielding varieties of corn, rice and wheat transformed agriculture in
developing countries. "Things had been dragging along slowly for 20 years and
suddenly now there's a huge amount of interest," says David Bransby, 56, a
professor at Auburn University in Auburn, Ala., who specializes in switchgrass.
Mr. Bransby says his colleagues once looked down their noses at his
switchgrass experiments. Most students never showed any interest in the plant
either, which he understood as there were no jobs in the field. These days,
however, he gets more than 100 emails a day from everyone from kids
researching science-fair projects to other professors. He has met with President
Bush twice in the last year to talk about cellulosic fuel. And private consulting
now augments his academic income: He says he recently set up a meeting
between a Texas-based biotech firm and a Silicon Valley venture-capital firm that
invests in biotech companies working on cellulosic fuels.
At universities, student enrollment in plant biology is rising and the programs are
expanding, particularly at schools with new energy-industry grants. The
University of Illinois had more than 50 applications for five graduate-student
research positions in biofuels this year, up from fewer than three applicants last
year. UC Davis is in the process of getting nine new biofuel research projects up
and running on campus, and it is looking to hire at least three new faculty
members to work on biofuels. Chris Somerville, a Stanford University plantbiology professor, says he fields queries every day from students wanting to get
involved in biofuels.
Stanford University graduate student Charlie Anderson is one such student. For
years, Mr. Anderson studied animal cell biology, specifically the structure of
mouse skin cells. But in February, the 26-year-old decided to change his focus to
biofuels, and he hopes to pursue postdoctoral work on cellulose fiber in plant-cell
walls. "If a company like BP is willing to give $500 million to a university for
biofuels research, it's not just a flash in the pan," Mr. Anderson says.
Indeed, recruiting plant biologists and investing in biofuels is a long-term
endeavor. Few realistically expect cellulosic biofuel to be produced commercially
or affordably for at least five years, partly because of the complexity of
determining how best to convert plant cellulose into fuel. BP's Mr. Koonin says
he's hoping for some "quick wins" from the $500 million his company gave to the
Energy Biosciences Institute, but he acknowledges that scalable production
could take as long as 10 years.
Ten years is a drop in the bucket for Mr. Long, who has studied plants since he
was a teenager in his native England four decades ago. In college at Reading
University in the early 1970s, Mr. Long specialized in agricultural botany. He
began researching Miscanthus in 1980 after he saw the plant growing in gardens
across England.
Mr. Long particularly homed in on Miscanthus X giganteus. The plant is a hybrid
of two grass species, making it "strong and sterile, like crossing a donkey and a
horse to make a mule," he says. The grass, which grows up to 13 feet high and is
native to Asia, produces more living matter per acre than switchgrass. Mr. Long,
who says he's getting a 15% raise in his annual salary because of BP's $500
million grant, helped make this hardy perennial grass a front-runner species in
the race toward cellulosic fuel.
Because his research hasn't always been in vogue, Mr. Long says he
discouraged an undergraduate student when she approached him in 2000
wanting to pursue Ph.D. research on Miscanthus. "I told her there wouldn't be
any jobs," he says. But by the time she graduated in 2006, she had two job offers
from biotech companies and one from a university. "Was I ever wrong," he says.
Write to Malia Wollan at malia.wollan@wsj.com