By Linda F. Jarrett
Rising gas prices. Rising food prices. In the face of these challenges, area biofuel laboratories are working to find answers to the continuing fuel dilemma.
Everyone agrees that the United States needs to disentangle itself from its dependence on foreign oil. The problem is finding a solution that will be palatable to everyone. Debates are raging about the answer. Ethanol? Offshore drilling? Opening up lands once off limits?
Commerce Magazine checked in with Abengoa Bioenergy, The Donald Danforth Plant Science Center and the National Corn to Ethanol Research Center to see what was in their pipelines to help address these problems.
Donald Danforth
Plant Science Center
Last April, the Center received a $1.2 million grant from the National Biodiesel board headquartered in Jefferson City. The grant also had funding support from the U.S. Department of Transportation.
The grant would fund a three-year research project designed to enhance the oil production in soybeans, increasing America's supply of renewable oil in the production of biodiesel.
"This grant is yet another of the Danforth Center's unique partnerships for supporting basic plant science research," says Danforth Center President Dr. Roger Beachy. "The goal is to understand more about what limits the production and the amount of oil that's produced in each soybean seed, and to alter the metabolism of the soybean seed so that a larger percentage of the energy goes into making the oil."
Danforth Center Principal Investigator
Dr. Jan Jaworski is heading up the research project. "Our aim is to increase the percent of oil from the current levels of about 20 percent to 25 percent," he says. "If it is raised to 25 percent, the increase would be over 600 million gallons annually. And that is quite significant, especially since Missouri is the fifth largest producer of soybeans in the United States.
"From our standpoint," he says, "the trick is going to be increasing the oil without decreasing the overall yield of the plant. The typical problems that occur with biotechnology are, many times, you get an increase in oil, but to the severe detriment of the plant, and itÕs not a useful product under those circumstances."
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's life cycle study, pure biodiesel reduces life cycle carbon emissions by
78 percent. In 2007, using biodiesel reduced greenhouse gas emissions the equivalent of taking 700,000 cars off America's roads.
The Center is also partnering with Metabolix Inc., based in Boston, Mass., for a biotechnology project involving producing a biodegradable plastic in seeds. A one million dollar grant from the Missouri Life Science Research Board will enable the Center to work over two years on finding this plastic called polyhydroxyalkanoate (PHA).
Jaworski says that, depending on how the plastics are blended, they can be used for credit cards, gift cards and golf tees, anything that could be a hard plastic.
"The idea is that we would be producing them in a plant, and that's a green approach," he says. "Furthermore, they would be completely biodegradable and harmless. So from the ecology standpoint, it's a great product."
Metabolix is also putting five scientists doing parallel experiments in the NIDUS Center this year.
"These are not the same, but complementing our experiment," Jaworski says. "This has an immediate economic impact, so the idea is that once we produce plants that are capable of producing significant quantities of these PHAs, Metabolix will plan field tests and all that is necessary to get this product on the market."
National Corn to Ethanol Research Center
Located on the campus of Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, the National Corn to Ethanol Research Center has made strides in four areas during the last year, according to Director John Caupert:
Launching the Work Force Training (WFT) Program. Instituted a year ago, the program has produced approximately 400 applicants in the program. "When we spoke to vendors in the biofuels industry," Caupert says, "we heard there was need for qualified people that talk the talk and walk the walk. We viewed that as an opportunity, since we're this hybrid organization that's a quasi-academia, quasi-government, quasi-trade association, and quasi-industry, all rolled into one, so it was just a natural to add the WFT to our other programs.
"These 400 people have received training in what we call the fundamentals of applied ethanol process operations. We do it in a setting that includes classrooms, computer simulation training and, over here, you roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty in the laboratories and pilot programs.
Monitoring the progress of the Energy Bill signed by President George W. Bush at the end of 2007. Caupert says that, since the passage of the bill, the NCERC has averaged one industrial client a month "which is record-setting. Our pilot plant is booked up almost until December.
"We are working with cellulose-type
feed stocks. In other words, converting
products other than starch into ethanol, which the energy bill calls for," he says. "The energy bill wants 20-plus billion
gallons of renewable fuels from post-cellulose, so if there was ever a justification or validation needed for the NCERC, the
energy bill was it."
Building efficiency into ethanol production. "This is energy conservation," he says. "Using less energy with water utilization, or tweaking the dry grind ethanol process.
Utilizing co-products. "This is a major one," Caupert says. "Every time a dry grind ethanol plant takes in a bushel of corn, there are 17 to 18 pounds of co-product produced, or distiller grains, which are used for feed by the livestock industry."
What makes this unique, Caupert says,
is that this is the "only entity in the world where corn growers, the ethanol industry, and livestock producers can come together and work together on a single topic
area which happens to be co-product
utilization. What originates as corn from the corn growers, goes through the ethanol
production process, and then ends up
being a co-product used as feed by the
livestock industry to complete the circle of agriculture."
Speaking to the debate of food and fuel, Caupert says that while the debate is raging "out there," the real question is "is there an issue of food versus fuel, and the answer is 'no.' Why? Because this nationÕs farmers are the best in the world and they're meeting the demand for food and fuel."
Abengoa Bioenergy Corporation
When President Busch signed The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 into law last December, he opened the door for providing dramatic increases in vehicle fuel economy standards and in the usage of renewable fuels from both traditional grain starch feed stocks, and from advanced feedstocks such as cellulose.
This helped Abengoa Bioenergy Corporation to get two grants from the U.S. Department of Energy, one of which will help fund the construction of one of the first commercial scale cellulose facilities in the United States.
"This $76 million grant will enable us to build this plant in Hugoton, Kan.," says Executive Vice President Chris Standlee. "The cellulose expectation will be about 15 million gallons a year. This will be co-located with another starch-based plant which will produce approximately 90 million gallons a year."
Abengoa also has two ethanol facilities under construction across the river in Madison, Ill., and Mt. Vernon, Ind. Both employ about 65 people and are expected to be operating by late 2009.
"Both of these should produce 88 million gallons per year," Standlee says.
To put this in perspective, Standlee says that among these facilities, the output should be close to "300 million gallons a year which means 300 million gallons of foreign oil that America will not have to import."
Standlee addressed the ongoing criticism of the ethanol industry about causing the rise in food prices.
"All of the legitimate studies out there have indicated that's not a real issue," he says. "The Department of Energy and the USDA just released some figures that indicate that .02 percent of one percent is due to ethanol, and the great majority is due to rising energy prices. When you think of all those Arkansas chickens being transported to California by diesel, you can understand why rising energy costs have an impact on food."
In Summary
The objective is to reduce America's dependence on foreign oil, and to bring alternative energy sources to the consumer at a competitive price. Biotechnology and biofuels scientists in the St. Louis BioBelt are keeping ahead of the curve in finding these alternative sources. |
