Tonight, it's a real pleasure to have Tim Donohue
here to talk with us about the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research
Center. This talk was scheduled to be
about four weeks ago, but he got a call from the folks at
the Department of Energy asking him if he might want to come to
Washington for a little conference at the same time.
He went to that conference, which meant we got to have him
on December 19. So we're really grateful to
have him here. He's a professor in the
Department of Bacteriology. You can see the reflection of
Hiram Smith Hall in the beautiful new building of the
Microbial Sciences Building. He's also director of the
Wisconsin Bioenergy initiative. He got his Bachelor of Science
in 1975 from the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn.
His Masters and PhD in 1980 from Penn State.
He spent six years at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign in the microbiology department.
It's a pleasure to welcome Tim Donohue
to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. ( applause )
Thanks, Tom. Thanks for inviting me.
And thank you, everybody, for having the patience to allow me
to go to Washington, DC. This new center that I'm going
to tell you about is funded by the Department of Energy
to the tune of about $25 million a year.
And so when they asked me to go to Washington, DC, I kind of
have to say yes. So how many of you--
Let's start out with a quiz. How many of you have heard
about this at some level? So some number.
Okay, so we are a new center, funded by the Department of
Energy to generate strategies to make fuels from biomass.
Mostly ethanol, as the fuel of today and possibly tomorrow.
And mostly from the cellulosic part of plant biomass.
And I'll explain a little bit about what that is in the
future. This is a big endeavor.
This is literally the largest grant that the University of
Wisconsin-Madison has ever gotten.
So given how proud we are of being a large research
institution, this is a big one. And we're real happy to have it
here. As a big one, we're finding out
it's creating new opportunities and challenges for us, because
I can't go to anybody across campus and ask them how they've
run something like this before, because nobody has ever done it
here. ( inaudible )
Turn off my cell phone, okay. We have been told by the
Department of Energy that they view us as a national lab, the
equivalent of one of their national labs.
You may have heard of Argonne, or Oak Ridge, or Los Alamos,
some of their big national labs.
And so this is in essence, if you accept what they're saying,
bringing a national lab to the UW-Madison campus.
That's different. Anyone know, is there another
national lab on campus? Yes?
Forest Products Lab. >> Forest Products Lab is
actually a USDA Forestry Service national lab.
And the last time we brought a national lab to campus was when
the USDA Forest Products Lab was opened.
Anyone except her know when that was?
( laughter ) >> 1939?
1910, so it's almost 100 years ago.
So this doesn't happen around here very often.
And for all those reasons, we're really, really excited
about it. I expect you to interrupt me.
If I don't get through everything, that's okay.
If you have questions, if you don't understand what I'm
talking about, or you think I'm selling you a bag of goods
and you want me to answer some more details about what
I'm talking about, just stop me. If I don't get through
everything, that's okay. So what I want to do is talk
about how we got here. How did we get to bring this
national lab here; who we are; what we're going to do.
And if I have time at the end, I'll spend a couple minutes
talking about what we want to do on campus, in the state and
with our partners at UW-System to do even more than this
$25 million a year elephant is funded to do.
Okay? So first, how did we get here?
How did the Department of Energy decide that they wanted
to set up bioenergy research centers to explore how to get
fuels from biomass. And in fact, they set up three
of them. There's ours that's centered
here. There's one that's centered in
the Berkeley area around Lawrence Berkeley Lab.
And there's one that's centered in Tennessee, around Oak Ridge
National Lab. And we're all virtual centers.
We all have partners all over the place.
So how did the federal government decide they wanted
to spend $75 million a year on bioenergy?
So the specific part of the story starts actually about two
years ago today. I and about seven of my
colleagues from UW-Madison were called by the DoE to go to
Washington, DC, and help them write a white paper or a report
that talked about the potential for generating fuels from plant
biomass, in particular the cellulosic part of biomass.
And I make the case that there were about seven of us here
from Madison. And by Madison, I mean from the
Forest Products Lab, from the Chemistry Department, and me
from Bacteriology, and people from the Dairy Forage Lab, so
from the community. That happened to be, if you
look at the back of this report and see who came from where,
that happened to be the largest number of people from any given
institution. So even early on, the DoE
figured out that we had a large critical mass of people here
that could help them solve this problem.
The problem was that they wanted to be able to realize
this goal that the president and many of our governors have
stated about running our cars with 30% ethanol in our gas
tanks. Right now, if you pull up to a
gas pump and you put fuel in your car, it's about 10%
ethanol. So they wanted to increase that
by at least three-fold. And have everybody in the
country do it. So in order to do that, we need
a huge amount of ethanol compared to what we're making
now. And what we're making now, as
you already know, is leading a large so-called
food versus fuel debate. Because we are taking the
sugars in corn kernels and converting that into ethanol.
Not because I think it's scientifically wise to steal
ethanol from my table in the summer, or from the cow's food
chain, but because it's what we scientifically know how to do.
If we're going to make three times more ethanol, we can't
plant three times as much corn. We don't have the land.
The land wouldn't sustain it. We need to find the sugars to
make that ethanol from somewhere else.
Well it turns out there's a large amount of plant sugars
that are either burned or used for no practical purpose right
now in the world and in the country.
And that's the cellulosic part of the plant.
And the DoE estimated in this report that we would need to
process a billion tons of cellulosic biomass every year
into ethanol to realize this goal.
That's a lot. The scale of this problem is
huge. But it turns out there's about
1.3 billion tons of cellulose that's excess, waste material,
on the land in this country every year.
So the raw materials are there to realize this challenge.
What we need is the technology to get it to cellulose and
convert it into fuels. So that's simple.
Why is it so hard to get the sugars out of cellulose?
Who's wearing a cotton shirt? Your cotton shirt is made of
cellulose. When you put that cotton shirt
in the washing machine, does it dissolve?
No. That tells you that cellulose
does not dissolve in water. It's this insoluble polymer,
where the sugars are all bundled up in the fibers that
we need to release so that we can get the sugars out.
Once we get the sugars, life is easy.
We drive over to Milwaukee, you see Miller Brewing.
You know they know how to make ethanol from sugars.
Society has been making ethanol for hundreds of years, either
in the wine or beer industry. And we do it on a large scale.
The trick is to dissolve my shirt into the component parts
that can be converted into fuels.
So that's what we need. And when we dissolve the shirt,
it's not just going to be glucose that we use to make
beer from. It's going to be a mixture of
different sugars, or a mixture of different compounds.
So we need to have processes at the downstream end as well
that are either chemical or biological that will convert
those sugars into various fuels.
Right now, we work on a very single appetite ethanol food
chain. We take one kind of sugar and
we make ethanol out of it. You've got to think about it
like you're walking up to a smorgasbord table and right now
we make all of our ethanol from one plate.
You've got to get technology to get at the different types of
sugars that are going to be on that smorgasbord table so we
can generate fuels that way. So there's an upstream end to
deal with the plants, and a downstream end to deal with the
conversion by microbes and chemistry to make fuels out of
the plant material. So the game in this report was
to figure out strategies by which we could take biomass,
cellulose and other excess plant material that is commonly
burned or is waste, from both crops, again, not the kernels
of corn, the stalks and the ears, the stuff that we don't
eat. So we would remove the food
versus fuel debate. From grasses, you may hear of
switchgrass, prairie grass. It can be harvested every year.
It comes back all by itself without putting fertilizer
down, without putting pesticides down.
Or trees. The leftover wood that the
forestry industry generates when they make paper, it's
currently burned. Can we take those wood chips
and convert it into fuel, into high-value products.
Yes, ma'am? >> You talk about prairie grass
grows all by itself without fertilizing.
What about the effect of, if you didn't take the prairie
grass, the grass that dies in the fall, goes back to the
soil. What about the effect on the
soil productivity and everything else if you're
talking all of this biomass? >> So give me about 15 or 20
minutes, and I'll get there, okay?
Of the three centers-- What you're talking about is
how sustainable will this whole new biomass-based economy be.
And the answer is we don't know.
Because we haven't invented it yet.
But of the three centers, this center is the one, the only one
that has any science proposed to address those questions.
So we can, as best as we can, predict what might happen
before Tim takes his crazy ideas from the lab and the
greenhouse and puts it in the field.
So we need to worry about-- One of the many things we need
to worry about is the answer to that excellent question.
But I don't have it yet. I view myself in the following
situation. When I was a little kid, I
remember President Kennedy saying, "We want to go to the
moon." And I don't remember
President Kennedy saying we were taking a 747 from JFK
airport. I grew up in New York City, so
everything is focused about New York City.
But whether he said we were going to take a Mercury rocket
or whether he said we were going to take a two-stage
Apollo spacecraft with a lunar lander and a ship coming back.
So I view your question the same one as someone asking
John F. Kennedy, when he said, "I want to go to the moon,"
how are we going to do it. And just like he didn't have
the answer then, we don't have the answer now.
That's not a cop-out. That's just a fact.
Okay? So the game is to take this
material and convert it into these types of products.
Ethanol is all over the newspapers.
Not because I think it's the best thing to add to fuel.
It has problems. We can talk about that.
But it's what we know how to make today.
That's why we're doing it. Making diesel, which is
basically making oil. Hydrocarbons.
Making other energy sources. Making hydrogen.
Making electricity directly out of this plant biomass.
Or making these things called chemical feedstocks.
Now what do I mean by that? The chemical industry now uses
a large amount of fossil fuel to crack it, to make simple
chemical precursors that they then take to polymerize and
make things like this carpet. If we can make those precursors
out of plant material, then chemical industry doesn't need
to take that barrel of fuel out of the ground to make my
carpet. And any barrel of fuel we can
leave in the ground and replace with this material leaves us
another barrel of fuel in the ground.
So there's also an interest to make high-value chemistry out
of these products. Okay?
So that's kind of how we got here.
So this report was released in June, 2006.
In August, 2007, in what I think is amazing speed, the
federal government agreed with everything we said in here, and
said we need this large, for lack of a better word,
Manhattan style project. Big science centers focused
around this to do things. The Manhattan Project has all
sorts of connotations. Going to the moon is a better
one. ( laughter )
They issued a request for proposals to fund several
of these centers. And everyone all over the
country saw this and said, "Ooh, $25 million a year for
five years. How are we going to play in
this game?" So what we did, as a campus,
is we looked at where we are. We sit right here in the middle
of one of the richest agricultural parts of the
country. And we said we know how to
interface with the producers of grain and forestry material.
The governor now tells me we are the largest forestry
producing state in the U.S. And close to 40% of the biomass
that can meet this billion ton challenge, is produced by the
states on this map. So it made sense to put one
of these centers here. Is that argument going
to get us funded? No.
Because as a taxpayer, if the science is better in Boston or
New York City, or Atlanta, or San Francisco, wouldn't you
want the centers where the best science is?
So we wanted a center in the Midwest.
And we decided as a campus, with the leadership of John
Wiley, the chancellor, and others, to let the faculty
decide how they were going to structure this proposal.
They came to myself and one or two other people and said you
guys figure out what the best strategy is to try and get one
of these grants. If that means that UW-Madison
should go it alone and put in a proposal, I'm right there with
you. If that means that we should
partner with someone else in the Midwest, or anywhere else
in the country, to put the best science together, you can do
what you want to do. If we partner and it means that
we're not the lead institution and we only get a few shekels
out of this $25 million, we're still better off because we'll
do good science here with whatever we get.
So at the end of the day, after feeling like I was figuring out
who I was going to the senior prom with, because there are an
enormous number of phone and email dialogues about who
wanted to team with whom, what was going to go on in one
proposal, who had to be the lead, because their governor
promised this, that and the other thing if they were the
lead. We decided on the following
model. We decided that we have a large
amount of similarity and complements with Michigan
State University in East Lansing.
And we decided to put in a proposal from the Midwest that
captured the scientific expertise mostly of these two
centers. And what was missing, we were
going to fill out with some other people.
By doing this, we buried ourselves in this agricultural
hotbed. We took advantage of the fact
that this region has the major large engine-producing
commodity group in Detroit, and the major small engine group in
the Milwaukee region. So we had the consumers of our
fuels waiting for us to make, and wanting to have a dialogue
already, about what I can put in their gas tank.
And I've only had money for six weeks, and I haven't even hired
everyone to do this. We have farmers and forestry
people very interested in new uses for their farm products.
We have agricultural implement makers and food processors down
here and over here ready to hear about what we're going to
make. We have an economic engine in
Chicago, in the Twin Cities and Detroit, ready to take our
materials to the market place. If you take this region on this
map and strip it out from the United States, the economy of
this region would be the third largest region in the world,
behind the remainder of the United States and Japan.
So when we make products, we have companies here that are
going to be ready to take it to the market place.
So with that logic, we put together the following team of
people. Yes, sir?
It would occur to me that you're talking about how our
biomass is available in the country.
But right next door in Canada, between all the agriculture and
the forestry stuff they've got going on, they've got to have a
significant amount that we could essentially import.
Well, I don't know that we want to import it, but we would
like to export our technology to them.
Because any time you import something, you've got to track
it somehow, either on a truck or train.
And that costs you energy. So I think at the end of the
day, what we're going to see ten, 20 years down the road, is
a large variety of scaleable technologies that work here.
Different technologies that work here, given the different
feedstocks that are going in. And those might be different
than the ones that work over here.
Okay? If we replace a single node
technology based on fossil fuels, we had a single node
technology based on biofuels to get 20% of our fuel, let's say,
we are no better off than we were when we started.
Because that will all sorts of constraints associated with it.
People will want to try and plant corn up here.
And that's not going to work, right?
We need to deal with a diversified set of crops.
Things that grow in Wisconsin aren't going to grow in
Florida. Things that grow in Florida
aren't going to grow in Wisconsin.
So we need to be ready to diversify and do things locally
to try and get the best energy balance out of our products as
we can. That's where we are.
Again, I can't tell you how. That's where I want to be, but
I can't tell you how we're going to get there.
So our team includes us and it includes Michigan State.
And if you look at the research budget the way the grant was
submitted, probably 80% of the dollars or 85% will be spent in
these two places. We filled out the program with
partnerships from Iowa State, from Illinois State University,
the University of Florida, Oak Ridge National Lab, and the
Pacific Northwest National Lab way out here up on Ag Hall.
We have a local company involved call Lucigent
Technologies, which is out in Middleton, right off the
Beltline. And I have WARF up here because
WARF, just like we are leading the Center, WARF, the Wisconsin
Alumni Research Foundation, is the group that handles all
technology that comes out of UW that gets patented
and then gets licensed. WARF has already put together a
team, a virtual tech transfer team, just like we have a
virtual center here, to handle all intellectual property that
will come out of this center, in a one stop shopping way.
If you're a company that sees something we want, you'll be
able to find our patents on our Web site or on the WARF Web
site. And there will be someone
there who will handle it, regardless of whether that
intellectual property was generated solely at Madison or
half at Madison and Michigan State, or 10% at each of our
partners. You as a company don't need to
get involved in haggling with five or six tech transfer
people. It's all done in a one stop
shopping way. And that, I think, will enable
us to get technologies out to the marketplace much faster
than we could in some other model.
Yes, sir? >> How does WARF stack up
with tech transfer places in, you know, Illinois and
Michigan? Have you worked with WARF
before? >> I've worked with WARF
before. There's been one Presidential
Medal of Science given for intellectual property in
tech transfer, and that's to Carl Gulbrandsen at WARF.
WARF has, I think, the second or third largest IP portfolio
in the country. So if we're a big research
gorilla, they're a big IP entity.
So I think that clearly helps us when we move forward.
So this is a big grant, and we're really proud of it.
But you know, this $25 million a year that we're getting is
stacked up against almost a billion dollars a year
that the campus gets, and another $500 million
or $600 million over here. So as big as it is, it's not
like it's going to drive everything that goes on on this
campus. But it says that this
institution and these institutions have the ability
to mount large research programs.
All of those things helped us when we put the proposal in
with this team. And I think we're really proud
of the team that we have that's reflected here.
So what are we going to do? Our mission is to perform the
fundamental research to remove the so-called bottlenecks, the
things that prevent us from converting biomass into
bioenergy. And I want to stress a couple
of things as I go through this. We are doing fundamental, basic
discovery research in this center.
Both because we're in an academic center, and that's
kind of what we do. We're not a company trying to
bring things to the market in two months.
But because we believe there is so much that needs to be done.
We need to do the discovery fundamental research first,
before we translate those findings into the field.
That is consistent with what was in that DoE report.
The sad part of my story to a lot of people, is if you read
that DoE report, it estimates it's going to take 15-20 years
to transform how we generate fuels from biomass.
So I'm in a honeymoon period. I'm running a program that has
a lot of money. We've had money for six to
eight weeks. My honeymoon is not going to
last 20 years. We need, the report says the
first five years will be fundamental discovery research.
The next five years will be integrating those research
findings and seeing how it might work in the field or in a
refinery, in a corporate environment.
The third five years are integration, where you take all
of that and really start to build a new biofuels based
economy. So there's a part of me that
wants this to happen tomorrow. But the sad thing is it's not
going to happen for a while. We will make discoveries that
change how we do things in the first year, two or three years.
This total transformation is needed to use that billion tons
of cellulose and efficiently generate fuels out of it is not
going to happen over night. Just like we didn't go to the
moon six months after John F. Kennedy said I want us to go
there. It took a while.
We have to be realistic about how long this is going to take.
You can break down what we want to do into five or six general
areas. Five of them are research
areas. And I'm going to quickly go
through some of these at the level that you want me to.
And you can think about it as a linear chain, where at the end
of the day, we want a new economy that's sustainable.
In order to get there, we need to figure out how to change
plant biomass so that Tim's cotton shirt might dissolve
when he puts it in the washing machine.
We need to change the cellulose or change the fuels.
And it could be that if that's what Tim does, there's going to
be two types of plants. There's going to be plants that
are used for fuels and plants that are used for other
purposes. And farmers are going to have
to make an informed decision as they want every year when they
plant how much corn should they put into feed, and how much
corn should they put into energy.
How much cotton should I put into shirts, and how much
cotton should I put into energy.
That could be what we're talking about 15 years from
now. I don't know, but it could be.
But we clearly need to change plant biomass.
The next thing is to process that plant biomass to get the
sugars out of this cellulose. The next thing is to improve
how we convert those sugars into ethanol and other fuels.
And the fourth thing that's unique to our center is to make
sure that when we're ready to roll things out from Tim's lab
into the fields, we know we've got to be economically viable
for those companies that want to take those products,
hopefully without government price supports.
And environmentally sustainable so that we don't ruin the land
that we live in, and have a worse problem 20 years from now
than we have today. You may say, well Tim, this
sounds really great. Everyone here I think remembers
the Arab oil crisis in the early '70s.
Why didn't we do this in the 1970s?
The answer is we started. Without going into the politics
of whether that was the right decision or not, we also
stopped. And we might be a heck of a lot
better off today if we didn't stop.
I can't guarantee that. But I think given what we've
done in other parts of society, we might be.
But the fact of the matter is given where we are and what I'm
going to talk about, or mention if I can, genomics based
approaches, where we can get at the genetic blueprints of
plants and microbes that are going to power this engine very
efficiently, we can do this a heck of a lot better now than
we ever could in 1970. And the last part of the
program that we're equally, if not more proud of, is we have a
set-aside budget specifically for education and outreach.
And that's something that really resonates with two
Big Ten universities running this center.
We are still paid by the governor of the state of
Wisconsin and the governor of Michigan.
I work for the university. I don't work for the DoE, even
though I'm at their beck and call.
Part of our job continues to be to educate our students, both
undergraduate and graduate, and to educate our stake holders in
the community, whether they're farmers or engine
manufacturers, or the husband and housewife from Milwaukee
who might want to take some of this technology and use it to
heat their home, about what we're bringing out so that they
understand what's going on. We have a small amount of money
in this when you look at it on the fraction of the total.
But given the size of the total, the amount of money we
have in this is bigger than some department's state budget
for education. So we can make significant
inroads in the putting together programs that will inform the
public K-12, farmers, companies, etc., on what's
coming down the road and how this might change their life
in the future, and career opportunities for people.
So before I launch off into science, are there any other
questions about where I've been?
Yes? ( inaudible )
The question is what's the relationship between us and
the other two biofuel centers. Are we going forward
hand-in-hand singing, "Kum By Ya"?
Are we in direct competition? Where are we?
To this day, I have not seen the other proposals of the
centers. So I don't know exactly what
they're doing. That's confidential
information. There have been significant
dialogues and presentations that we've made with other
people in the room about what we're going to do.
There is a large amount of science in the three centers
that is not going on anywhere else.
There is an interest by the agency and by the scientists
for us to share information in a protected way, so that it can
be brought to the marketplace and move this train forward as
fast as we can. Are there some things that we
each might be thinking about doing as an endpoint?
I bet there probably are. I can't tell you whether it's
one percent or ten percent. I bet we're doing it in a
different way, given the strengths and the approaches
that are going on in the three centers.
( inaudible ) That's true.
But there's also already-- The question is there could be
an issue of how we do this in the future if patent revenue is
generated. Where does that patent revenue
go? Does it go to my center, or the
Bay Area Center, or the Oak Ridge Center?
We've got that problem, I think, figured out within our
center, because we've got a master agreement, it's called,
to handle all of that internally.
I know there have already been conversations between WARF and
the IT people in the other centers to prepare for the day
when we're going to collaborate and bring technology forward.
You know, we're not there yet. But we want to prevent what
you're worried about. I want to prevent it as a
scientist. I want to prevent it as a
taxpayer, because I don't want $75 million a year going to do
the same $25 million a year science in three centers.
That would be kind of stupid. There actually is a
Congressional mandate that when federal agencies fund research,
they do not fund duplicative research.
So the agency who has read all three proposals has signed in
blood that there is not direct overlap between what's going on
in these centers. They haven't directed us to get
out of this game and move into another game because of that.
And they have the right to do that.
Yes? >> Will you be partnering with
the Forest Products Lab? >> We will be collaborating
with the Forest Products Lab. So the question is will we
partner with the Forest Products Lab, or the Dairy
Forage Lab, some of the other USDA centers on campus.
We are allowed to collaborate with them.
And we are all allowed to send our center employees to work in
labs of the USDA Forest Products and Dairy Forage Lab
centers, to take advantage of unique expertise that's there.
They are also allowed to embed federal employees from those
labs in our center. We are prevented, by federal
mandate, from using DoE funded money in this center to
directly support the salaries of USDA employees.
Okay? So we can collaborate.
We can't partner in certain ways.
When we submitted the grant, we had to make that perfectly
clear, who was involved. And although we were talking to
other people, they could not be getting money from us.
Yes? >> Is there political
interference from the state of Wisconsin to Michigan?
Is there a political interference from the states of
Wisconsin and Michigan? In fact, there is political
love from both states. ( laughter )
So far, to the two, at the following level.
When we were announced as the winner of this award, the
governor, Governor Doyle, was at the local press conference.
I was sent off to Washington. And Governor Doyle, at that
point, made a public announcement of what he had put
in a letter in the proposal. And that is, that he is
committed to helping build $100 million building on this
campus with $50 million of state funds to house the
activities of the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center.
Plus, other activities in the bioenergy sector for the state
of Wisconsin. He also made a commitment in
that letter to make a budget add specifically to the
activities related to biofuels that would go on in this
center, to hire new faculty that could work in this area,
to the tune of $4 million a year.
So that's a recurring commitment that was in his
letter. We do not have or need a
building commitment from Michigan, but we have a similar
commitment from the governor to increase faculty presence in
this area at the MSU campus, as well.
The flip side of that is it was literally a year ago Friday,
when I went down to the state and met with a variety of
cabinet secretaries and pitched what we wanted to do in this
grant, because it was due February 1, it was due a month
from now. And I told them that we felt
our scientific chances of getting funded would be
increased if we had leverage support from the state.
And they choked at the size of the leverage that they
ultimately agreed to. But to a person, they said this
is the best thing we have seen coming from this end of
State Street in a very long time.
Because it hits all sectors of the state.
It hits the businesses in Milwaukee and Green Bay.
It hits the corn and soy bean farmers in this part of the
state. It hits the forestry people and
the economy in the northern part of the state.
So they are very, very happy that we have gotten this.
Yes? >> Is the grant administered
through the university with its overhead?
Yes. >> So they're getting money
from it, too. >> They're getting money to
operate the facilities that we're housed in.
That's right. Yes?
Maybe I'm getting ahead of things again, but I look at
number four up there. What happens if you get to
sustainability and it doesn't work?
My opinion is from this center, it won't go out there.
It just won't go out there. None of us in this center want
to create a dust bowl, okay? None of us in this center want
to have practices that decrease water quality or decrease air
quality. We have just traded one really
bad problem for another either really bad problem or one
that's worse than the one that we got rid of.
One of the challenges of sustainability is whether you
can do the processes you want to do at a cost...
There's economic and environmental sustainability.
That's right. So things may fail from the
economic standpoint, especially if the government says we don't
want to price support any of this.
The government is underwriting ethanol, just like they
underwrite milk, corn and everything else right now, or
else our gas would be even higher.
They're talking about getting out of that business.
Does the sustainability determination include the cost
benefit relationship between the amount of energy that goes
in to get an amount of energy out?
It'll include everything from the impact on the soil,
the impact on the water, how it will impact what are commonly
called plant pest insects and animals that depend upon this
stuff we're calling waste cellulose, that they normally
feed off of. Two, how it will affect
greenhouse gases in the air, to how it will affect social
behavior. Land prices and market values.
We're going to try and capture as much information as we can,
and use that to build models that will predict how the
system will behave, from all of those scales, down from the
critters in the soil, the bacteria in the soil, to the
CO2 in the atmosphere, to what it'll do to farm prices and
people's behavior. Yes, sir?
You haven't talked much about what types of interaction
with industry, what the grant says about that.
Are you expecting that eventually you'll be getting
some investments from other sources?
We're kind of fighting them off until we get up
and running. I have a slide at the end that
lists all the companies that have already approached us that
want to be partners. So we have several ways of
interfacing with industry. We have a scientific advisory
board that includes academic leaders and industrial leaders
in the marketplace. Some of them are obvious.
They're some of the big ethanol producers, in Canada, since the
Canada question was raised, and in the Midwest.
Some of them are obvious to me from a scientific standpoint,
but they wouldn't necessarily be so obvious to others.
Like the chief of fermentations at Miller Brewing.
I'll come back to what I said before.
If there's anyone in the state of Wisconsin that knows how to
make a lot of ethanol, it's those folks.
He is psyched about being on our scientific advisory board.
Because they throw away a huge amount of waste, organic waste
stream, every day when they make beer.
And if they can use what we're going to invent to take that
material and turn it into fuel and heat their plants, they
have a much more sustainable building, which for them,
economically makes sense because they need to buy less
power from MG&E. But environmentally it makes
sense, because it keeps another barrel of fuel in the ground.
We have people on our board from GM and the motor industry.
We have a sustainability person on our board to keep us honest,
although maybe I have another candidate here.
( laughter ) So that's one piece.
We have a collaborators network of people who are talking about
wanting to partner with us because of the specific things
that we're doing that resonate with what their corporate
strategy is to move into this area.
We're beginning to talk to them with WARF and our IP people in
the room, so that whatever those conversations are,
they're structured properly. They're willing to be involved
at any level. Here's a specific project that
I think we could work with and it's in Tim's lab, to we would
like to talk about a master agreement where we get to look
at everything that's coming out of the pipeline every month and
see what cherries we want to pick.
And we're talking about all of that.
But there's not a lot of it that's been cemented because we
haven't had funding long enough yet to roll a lot of stuff out.
Yes? >> What does it mean for the
working research group on campus, like other people part
of the center, this national lab, how does that change your
day-to-day operations? >> It's totally screwed up my
life! ( laughs )
What will that mean to people?
It's a very interesting and important question.
I don't know how many people know what it's like to live in
my shoes every day, or my colleagues shoes.
But we are paid by the state. We have a teaching mission and
we have a research mission. And my research mission, since
this is mostly a research enterprise is met by me going
out and getting funding from the federal government mostly
in three or five-year slugs. And then when those disappear,
I've got to write this ugly thing called a renewal that
gets me funded for another three or five years.
And Uncle Sam usually doesn't come in and say after six
months, what did you do; after a year, what did you do.
You're meaning to file a report, they never really come in
and say, well you didn't really get that much done,
we're not going to give you that much money.
So we live in three to five year increments, okay.
The DoE has said to us correctly that they want this
to run more like a startup company.
They want us to think about them being a big venture
capital firm that's given this startup company $25 million a
year for five years. And they want us to think about
what are we going to do in the first year; what are your
milestones. And then at the end of the
year, what did you deliver. And periodically, we want to
evaluate ourselves, every three or six months.
Are we directing the right amount of funds to the right
number of people? That's a different model for
academics to live by. Because although Tim may get a
couple of people out of this, at the extreme, Tim's program
and the center may shut down after a year if Jordan's
program is doing so much better and the technology's going and
it's focused. And that is the way it should
run. Or Tim's program may need to
shut down because we just hired Tom.
He's a new, young assistant professor, and he brings all
the right technology into the center.
And we can't divvy up the money that much smaller.
So right now, we're funding about 30 or 40 teams of people.
It's not $25 million divided by 40, because some of what we're
doing is setting up core facilities that will support
the activities of all people. And then, within the teams of
people that we're funding, some of them are more central to the
mission. Others are from a more
exploratory and maybe high-risk and more, we're going to have
to evaluate. But what it really means for me
is if I go and hire somebody, I may not know with this new
grant that's funded for five years, I don't have funding for
him or her for five years. I may have to look him in the
face after a year and tell him I need to let somebody go.
And that's a particularly interesting dialogue for us at
a university, because so much of what we do that drives our
research engine is driven by graduate students.
And graduate students take four, five or five-and-a-half
years to get done. And in their first year,
they're doing what graduate students should do.
They're taking classes. They're doing some teaching.
They're not getting as much done in the lab as they do in
their fourth and fifth year. So there's a tension that we're
trying to figure out about how much of the science should be
done with senior people and people who already have a PhD,
and how much of it should be done with graduate students.
We want the graduate students to be doing it because we want
to be responsive to something that we put in the grant.
And that is that we're going to solve today's problems while
training tomorrow's bioenergy leaders, right?
But this tension is hitting us in an interesting way in terms
of how much of this activity can and should be done by
students. Yes?
What sector, such as the oil industry, could be adversely
affected by this? They have a vested interested
in a sense it's not-- >> I think the oil industry is
positioned to move into this market very, very aggressively.
One big example is, BP funded a center to do very similar
things to what these three federally funded centers
are doing, to the tune of $50 million a year
for ten years. That's half a billion dollars.
They want to do it because they see a day when petroleum going
into my gas tank is not the only game.
They also want to do it because today, the oil industry is the
largest purchaser of ethanol in the world.
And they don't like to buy anything from anybody.
This is a quote. We interviewed with BP.
They said we don't like to buy ethanol.
We want to make it ourselves. The other view that says the
oil industry is ready to move into this area is that the
Saudi Arabian government is building a whole institute in
Saudi Arabia with costs that will drive what I just said out
of the equation to get into renewable energy technologies.
So that's ground zero for where fossil fuels are coming from.
And they see the handwriting on the wall that some day, they're
going to need to be playing in this game a different way if
they want their economic viability to be maintained.
Yes? >> How about vegetable oils,
you know, like from algae or whatever?
It's not a part of this center.
We are doing what the donor said they wanted us to do in
the request for proposals. This proposal was focused
around generating ethanol from cellulose.
Okay, so about 75% of our budget is to improve plant
biomass by getting softer cellulose, and figuring out how
to convert it into ethanol. We have, one of the unique
things in our center is we bring to the table a large
amount of expertise in plant oil synthesis.
And one of the things that we are focused on in this area is
how do we train plants to take their carbon and put it into
oils. And have that oil deposited
throughout the whole plant, instead of only in seeds, like
soy beans put it in seeds. If we can get oil levels up to
20% of the total carbon throughout the stalk and the
leaf of a plant, that plant has an energy density per acre
that's five times higher than any plant that's on the planet
right now. And that plant could literally
be squeezed, the oil would come out of it, and it would be
ready to be mixed with petroleum at the pump head and
put in your car. So we have a large--
We're the only one of the three centers that has a large
program in fats, or oils, but it's in the plant end.
We're the only center that has a program down here in
generating hydrogen from sunlight, and then using that
to generate electricity. But we do not have, there's a
lot of interest in biodiesel, which is basically oil, from
algae. That is not part of what was
in the call for proposals. We're not there.
We have other programs we're trying to roll out under the
umbrella of this other thing that Tom mentioned, the
Wisconsin Bioenergy Initiative, that will capture parts of the
biofuels landscape that are not in this center.
But we don't have significant federal or even state funding
for that yet. >> We've got a lot of algae in
the lakes. >> I hear it every week.
I get an email a week, but we just were not allowed to go
there in this proposal. It was going to be the kiss of
death, so we didn't go there. But we're seeking other people
to work with to develop those programs.
( inaudible ) >> You know, they have all
these forest fires, but it's too expensive to get
all this wood out of there. But it's a huge fire hazard...
If the head of the Forest Products Lab was here,
Chris Risbrudt, he would say that of that 1.3 billion tons
of cellulose, several hundred million tons
of that sits on Forest Service land that is due to be
harvested by currently approved management plans.
We're not talking about strip and burn.
We're talking about what the government has said they can
harvest. And they can't harvest it
today, but those are the plots of land that typically create
forest fires that cost the federal government $2 billion
last year to fight. So if we can manage how to get
our hands on that excess forestry, we could save the
government ten times more than they're putting into these
centers every year to do this. This is a huge problem.
This is not Tim talking about deforesting every square acre.
This is what is currently approved to be removed from
federal land right now that we can't access.
Even if we could access, we couldn't convert it into fuels,
because I don't know how to get the cellulose converted into
sugars. Tom?
If you have time, could you go through some of your slides?
Sure. This is going to be real fast.
So I may have talked about this in a linear way, but the way
the center really works is each one of these points has a
circle here. And no section is going to
function in isolation. We're all going to do it in an
integrated fashion, where people in this group are
talking to that group. And so things coming out of
here are known about by the people who are going to process
them next. By doing that, that's an
advantage of big science, of having all of this money in the
hands of me, or one group of people to do it.
Because we can leverage technologies that we're all
working on together. That may make it sound like I
think big science is great. And although I'm running a
really big science program, I think there are advantages to
this, but I think we will go down the wrong road if as a
society, we continue to fund all of these big science
projects and don't have opportunities for me to do what
I talked about before, go write my little grant and let
everyone else do things. So if you think I've drank the
Kool-Aid on big science, I drank a little, but I'm not
addicted to it yet. So in terms of improving plant
biomass, I kind of talked about this a little bit.
We need to figure out the pathways and the regulatory
networks that will need to be turned so that we can make more
digestible plant polymers, more starch and other digestible
carbohydrates in plants, and make oils.
And about half of our budget is in these two bowls.
We're not going and doing this right away in plants that I
think are going to solve the bioenergy problem of tomorrow.
We're not doing it in poplar, which is everyone's favorite
tree, if you read the Scientific American literature.
We're not doing it in switchgrass, or miscanthus,
which is everyone's favorite thing.
We're doing it in model systems because they give us entry
points to find out the information we're going to need
to do this. And I'll just show you some of
them. A bunch of you probably know
what this is. This is nasturtium.
We grow this. You could put it on your
salads. This and other models are here
because they make very different types of cellulose.
They have specific sugars in them.
If I go to corn, it's got a combination of all of these.
If I go to a tree, it's got a combination of all of these.
And as a biologist, teasing out what's making this,
and this, and this in a system where you make one at a time
is much easier than teasing how they're made
when they're making them all together.
So we're focusing on models, and then we'll use that
information and breed new types of plants that make more of
these digestible types of cellulose than what we
currently have. We're doing it in model systems
like this. Again, I talked about a lot of
these. We have a lot of people.
We have a lot of robots, not because we don't like people,
but because robots can process a lot more samples today than
my best graduate student can. And if you want to get quick
answers to questions, you need to have ways to figure out
what's going to work well fast, and then focus on a few
problems. So we have the ability to look
at plants, wild-type plants, to make mutants in some of these
models, figure out what's important.
And then go to our breeders and say these are the traits you
need to look for. Breed this in switchgrass.
Breed this in poplar. Breed it in corn.
And we're going to do the same thing with making oils.
I made this point before. We'll get twice as much energy
per acre if we can make a little bit of oil throughout
all of its tissue. Once we get the plants, we need
to figure out how to take them apart.
We need to get this shirt, take apart all the fibers and make
sugars out of it. That seems easy, but it's not
because it needs to get out of this matrix.
We have programs to analyze a wide range of plant materials.
Because in the future, the plants they're going to use in
Mississippi aren't going to be the same plants they're going
to grow for biofuels in North Dakota.
So if I generate a solution that's good for Dane County, it
may not work everywhere else. So we need robots, again, and
facilities to analyze a range of plant material, and look at
a variety of different pretreatment conditions.
And we need enzymes or catalysts that are going to
help us break down this stuff and use for sugars.
So we need to look at a whole bunch of different
pretreatments. And this indicates it's going
to work with the previous group.
We need to understand what's going on.
I kept talking about the fact that when we degrade these
polymers, the game is to get sugars.
Because the wonderful microbes that I work on eat those sugars
and convert them into fuel. But not everything that comes
out of dissolving my shirt is going to be good for microbes.
There are toxins. So the game really is to treat
my shirt and optimize the amount of good sugars and
minimize the amount of poisons. We don't even know what the
poisons are that prevent the microbes.
Because if we can do that, then we can take a complex mixture
of plant material and feed it to microbes.
Right now, the stuff that's being fed to microbes needs to
be highly purified from the plant material.
Any time you have to purify something, it adds cost.
Any time you add cost, you're energy and economic balance
goes south. So we need to be able to look
for things that can be converted.
We need enzymes. This is one of my favorite
cartoons. It illustrates how we need to
go on bioprospecting mission. We need to look in different
ecosystems for novel enzymes that will help degrade my
shirt. Just like when you add
high-temperature detergents to your clothes, there are enzymes
in there that work at high temperatures to help get the
stains out. It's the same concept.
People have been looking for a long time for these enzymes.
They haven't found great ones yet.
They also haven't interrogated all of the ecosystems that are
out there. So one of the unique things
that we have, is we have a partnership thanks to a
colleague of mine in bacteriology, who I think will
give a great talk some day, Tom.
He was here already? He works on these leaf cutting
ants. So you've already heard about
this. This is an ecosystem that has
evolved over millions of years, where these ants do nothing but
eat leaves. Leaves are full of cellulose.
They do a better job of getting at the cellulose than the
microbes in the rumin of a cow. They totally degrade it.
They don't put it out as cow manure.
So we have a large program with our friends, in Cameron and his
people. And our friends out at Lucigent
to bioprospect the microbes that live with these ants, that
do all of this degradation, to look for better enzymes.
And if they're better, then can we engineer them to be even
better than what we've found in nature.
The enzyme issue is huge. If you think about processing a
billion tons of cellulose, and the enzyme needs, given the
current enzymes that we have, if I had the technology and I
wanted to make enough enzyme to process that billion tons of
biomass, I would shut down every fermentation plant in
this country that's making antimicrobials, vaccines,
insulin, everything else. Because of the sheer amount of
enzyme that we need. That is a scary fact, but it's
within a factor of two. One solution to that is to
train plants to actually make these enzymes in the plant.
And have them be asleep when the plants are growing and then
when they're harvested, do something to the plant, like
heat them up. Have the enzyme wake up and
start degrading the plant polymer into sugar.
Sandra Austin-Phillips, who works upstairs, has already
shown that that works with some enzymes in some plants.
So if we can engineer the plants to make the enzymes,
then I don't have to shut down the antibiotic industry or
build out all sorts of new fermentation capacity.
The next thing is we need to be able to convert the
complex sugars that are in plant material that we're
going to get into fuels. And a lot of it is ethanol.
There's a little bit of activity in hydrogen and a
little bit of activity in high-value chemicals.
There's some of that going on in other centers.
We're not doing much of that here.
We have, and I'm not going to go through it, we have both
biological systems that are based on genomics and based on
what's called strain evolution and optimization technology
that's been very successful in the pharmaceutical industry to
work on our platform microbes like yeast and E. coli
and some others. We also have a fellow across
the street in chemical engineering, by the name of Jim
Dumesic, who has pioneered work for how to take plant sugars
and chemically convert them into fuels.
And Jim was just named by Discover magazine yesterday,
as a matter of fact, as one of the top 50 scientists
in the country. Specifically for his work in
making alternative fuels from plant material.
That work has already started at a company in town called
Virent. So we have both biological and
chemical programs in the center that do that.
Jordan, in the back, is a microbiologist like me.
It may be heresy for me to say what I'm going to say.
But as a microbial chauvinist who thinks microbes can do
everything, I guarantee you there are going to be plant
materials coming out of this pipeline that aren't going to
be easy for us to get microbes to convert right away.
But chemistry can do that. Chemistry can take the stuff
that the microbes won't take in the short term or long term.
I'm not going to go through that.
That's Jim's stuff. I'm not going to go through
that. So sustainability.
We have a program in the center that's probably 15% of our
budget. It looks at making sure we have
ecological, agricultural and life cycle practices that are
economically viable and environmentally responsible.
To make sure, as best as we can, we're carbon neutral, or
we mitigate greenhouse gas emissions.
And we maintain water quality, biodiversity of our land and
pest suppression. If you look at where we're
going to have an effect, the green stuff here is where there
is higher agricultural activity.
And this is actually a misnomer.
It's very grain-centric. All this red stuff here is the
forestry in the state. So if we do this wrong, we will
ruin everything that's green on this map.
And we don't want to do that, going in.
We're the only center to have a program in this area.
We did it as a risk. Because the call for proposals
didn't specifically ask for it. But given where we are, coming
from two land grant institutions in the upper
Midwest, we said this is important enough to us that
we're putting it in here. If they want to fund this and
tell us to take it out, we'll fight them and we may do it.
But we're funded and we're told repeatedly how happy they are
that we have this in here. It's getting out ahead of the
curve. They didn't think they needed
to worry about this for five or ten years down the road.
But what we convinced them, is we need baseline data now,
before we start putting stuff in the land.
And so we're going to look at a variety of model agricultural
crops, from prairies up to corn.
The importance for that is that these are annuals.
These require high nitrogen, a lot of water, and they're not
very diverse. These are low-input.
They don't require fertilizer. They're highly diverse and they
come back every year. And we're going to start
testing their behavior on replicated plots here and in
the state of Michigan at the Kellogg Biological Station, and
elsewhere throughout the upper Midwest with our collaborators.
So when we're ready to put stuff in the field, we have
data on all of these things. We have data on how microbes in
plants interact in the soil, what makes healthy microbes and
what makes healthy soil. We have data on geochemistry in
that soil, biodiversity. We have economic data on price
per acre and variation. We have data on farm use and
design, regional and national impact.
We have data on economic modeling and environmental
modeling in the atmosphere to see how all these things are
going to be impacted. So as we move forward, we can
do this the right way. This is a significant amount of
farm work, but a lot of modeling.
And the modeling comes from the fact that we have free access
to DoE supercomputer clusters for all of our models to do
this stuff. One of the added benefits of
this is we get free access to certain other DoE national labs
to help us do things. This JGI here stands for the
Joint Genome Institute. They're doing $2 million of
sequencing for us, for free. It's not out of our budget.
But I know how much we asked for.
They're doing everything that we want and it's ramps up to
about $2 million. So this is, again, one of the
hidden advantages of big science.
I kind of went through this already.
It talks about the fact that by doing this now, we can capture
genomic sciences. We can use genome maps.
We can use technologies. Coming back to this, and that
is talking about these programs we have to train tomorrow's
leaders while we solve today's problems.
This includes workshops and educational models for
scientists at all levels, starting at K-12.
We have a whole communications program.
How many of you listen to Larry Mueller on Wednesdays at noon?
Okay. Once a month, Larry now has a
bioenergy interview. I've been there.
The dean has been there. People from Michigan have been
there. People from the state have been
there. Wednesdays at noon on NPR.
It was today. Who did he have today?
I know I have an email, but I can't remember.
( inaudible ) Yes, it was.
It was a lawyer from one of the big bioenergy firms in town.
We have programs that we want to bring out information to
members of the community and cities.
We're going to have in this new building a bioenergy discovery
center, so that people can come in and see what
it's really like, and really interact with things.
We have seminar programs. We're going to bring out new
courses for the campus to bring these concepts to students in
biology, engineering and computer sciences, because
there's impact from all of this on all of those disciplines.
We're going to roll out a summer research program, the
big students from other institutions that want to do
this but don't have access to it on their campus to do it
here at Madison. In particular, we'd like to
focus a lot of our efforts on institutions that have a large
amount of under-represented students, so we can bring
minorities into the field. And this is going to be the
easiest one, attracting graduate students.
We have been overwhelmed with students all the way in
high school are looking at us to come to graduate school here
after this has been announced. It's really gratifying to see
how many young people there are in the field that want to work
in this space and get trained. I've done a lot of really fun
things while I've been here, but this is got the potential,
for that reason alone, to be one of the most fun things that
I've ever done. So I'm going to shut up,
because I've run out of time. Since somebody asked me, this
is a list of the companies that have already approached us
about interacting with us. Some of them represent
companies like Miller and Iogen, that are already on the
scientific advisory board. Some of them are ones that have
come along more recently, like Syngenta and Monsanto, which
are two big plant biotech companies.
Some of them are companies that going back to a year ago, I got
on the phone with and asked them if they wanted to partner
with us when we were submitting the proposal.
And I called people I know, and they said, "Timmy, I'd love to,
but you know we're putting a proposal in from our state,
and I can't." But if you get funded, we'll
be in touch. And they're in touch.
And that's totally legitimate. You know, there was a large
amount of local interest in having these.
And now that it's clear who's funded, people are going to one
center, or to multiple centers if there are things here that
we're doing that they want to get access to or learn about.
And there are things at other centers that we're not doing,
or they can do better, maybe, that they want to learn about
also. So this is another part of my
new job. And it's something else I'm
learning how to do. So I want to thank you, see if
you have any other questions, and wish everyone a happy
holiday. ( applause )
Yes? >> Have you set your six-month
milestones? >> As of 4:00 yesterday
afternoon, we have approved funding for all 40 of these
projects. And every one of them have
six-month and one-year milestones.
Yes. Yes?
Do you have any concerns that milestones and some of
these pressures that you were describing could interfere with
the doing of basic science? >> No, because the agency has
been very clear. Funding these centers to do the
basic science to get things done.
The agency is going to depend on us, and they should,
to articulate the advances that we've made in a form that
they can take downtown to the people that provide them with
the funding to make sure that we get continued funding.
Nobody has an expectation that we're going to get this solved
in a year. I think that as a taxpayer, if
society looks out in ten years and say, we've funded three of
these centers at $75 million a year total, and we haven't
gotten anything done, then I think they have a legitimate
beef to question whether this has been a reasonable
investment. But I just don't think that's
going to happen as long as people have reasonable
expectations. How long have we said we're
going to cure cancer? Right?
Even how far down on a pathway you can get and it
fizzles. >> Absolutely.
There's a large amount of this that's discovery based science.
And everyone in the agency that I've talked to is acutely aware
of that. But they're also the ones who
need to go downtown and justify to Congress why this money
makes sense. Yes?
I remember another huge distributed project that came
into competition with some private projects, and that was
the Genome Project. Is there any policy in effect
that incorporate those potential companies, or geniuses, who will
race the federally funded projects to their goals?
So are there mechanisms in place to prevent a race between
corporate driven science to get this done and federally funded
science to get this done? I think there are protections
built in in what we've already seen.
I have a list of companies up there that want to work with
us, and are on our scientific advisory board.
Every one of those companies has to be approved by the
Department of Energy. So they want to make sure that
when we're giving technology out to people, we're doing it
on an even playing field. We're not favoring any one
company, because they happen to be on our scientific advisory
board. I think some amount of
competition is good. There's also a favorite
quote of mine in Nature Biotechnology
from September, by a vice president for biofuels
from Sonoco, which is another large oil company that's moving
in this area very aggressively in the academic sector.
And his quote is, "I would rather give my money in this
area to a great young assistant professor in the university
than have my corporate infrastructure figure out how
we should strategically position ourselves to do the
right science." Given where I work, I really
like that quote. ( laughter )
I think we can do science a heck of a lot better
than a lot of other companies can.
And then there's just how we get that technology to the
marketplace. I'm a big believer in that.
Yes? >> Two part question.
Given what you know, and what you think you know at this
point, which of the five major things do you think
will come through first? The second part of the
question, you know, what do you think are the most likely areas
to be productive? The second part of the question
is, to what extent does the success of this project depend
on having most or all of these major things come through?
So I think we're going to get a lot of early bang
for the buck out of what I call deconstruction,
because there's a certain amount of things we need to do, and
we can do with robotics, to look at different combinations
of pretreatment conditions. So for people who don't know,
pretreatment means you take a bunch of plant biomass and you
treat it to soften the cellulose.
And right now, there's a camp that likes acid and there's a
camp that likes base. But nobody has ever done a
rigorous study to look at different combinations and how
they affect different plants. So given who we have on this
team, and given who we have, and what we have built into it,
I think we have in the short term, if we want short bangs
for the buck, I think we're going to get a significant
amount of bang here. And the other reason for that
is is Lucigent has been doing this bioprospecting for over a
decade now. And on the side, because they
saw where technology was going, they started screening for
release of sugars from plant biomass about three years ago.
They already have two products that are ready to come out on
the market. So they have a pipeline all set
up. And now that we can feed them
material and feed them money to hire people, I think those two
people working together are going to get us release of
sugars much more efficiently in the short term.
These two things, I think, are two, three to five years down
the road. We will make some incremental
improvements in how to get more ethanol out down here.
And Jim Dumesic is phenomenal. The amount of money that we can
give him to help his program, which has been kind of cobbled
together. He's had good funding,
but not at this level. The amount of money that we can
give him, and get him involved with some really good discovery
organic chemists to make new processes, I think is going to
pay dividends there. I think what we can do with
ethanol production in E. coli and yeast will make some
incremental things. I think the plant stuff is
going to be a little slow. Not because I'm a
microbiologist and I'm down on plants, but plants take time to
grow. Okay?
Even in a greenhouse. So that means we have to be
more strategic in what we're going to do to think about how
we want to modify plants. And when I talked to the
agribusiness people, I'm getting another lesson in life.
They say to me, you give me a plant that you think is great,
you've got to realize it's going to take me ten years to
get that in the field. So before you give me a plant
that you think is great, you better really know that it's
great. I don't want you coming back to
me two years later and say that you have a better plant.
Because that costs a lot of money.
So I think the plant work, although it has a large bang if
we can make oils, and a large bang if we can do softer
cellulose, is going to take a little longer to come out of
the pipe. And the sustainability stuff,
we can get a lot of baseline data.
But how that relates to what we want to do is going to depend
on what comes down out of this end of the pipeline.
Yes? >> I was thinking $75 million
divided by three million people, that's like 25 cents a
year per person. That's not going to break us,
right? I mean, two bits a person a
year? >> This makes a lot of sense to
me for a variety of reasons. The biggest one in my opinion,
is we're going to run out of stuff at some point.
Compared to what we spend. >> And if we run out of stuff
and we have to start using coal and shale, we're going to have
more of a greenhouse gas problem than we have now.
So we are in essence doing an experiment with this planet
that we only get to do once, until we run out of fossil
fuels. So we've got to figure out how
we're going to do something before the clock ticks on
running that problem. There's health effects.
I've heard speeches where the head of the Centers for Disease
Control has said that how we address the environmental
impact of our energy habits is going to have the largest
impact on healthcare costs in this country, compared to
anything else. So you would think NIH would
care about this and the healthcare industry would care
about this if that fact is true.
There's environmental issues that are really legitimate and
real, and I'm a big proponent of that.
And there's these geopolitical and biodefense issues.
I can tell you what the preamble of that report says as
the reason we're doing this. But I would say there are at
least four or five very good reasons why this needs to be
done. Yes?
I can understand that the mission is to do basic
research. But if you take five or ten
years to get that part done, what is to say that the
biodiesel, that's the diesel engines that are going like 60
in Europe won't be put into cars and trucks and make
Hummers go 60 miles per gallon, and not have toxic effects on
the air that they put out? I read about a guy who's taking
90% of GM products and doing that with a Hummer with one of
their diesel engines and with his way of adding some energy
to take care of the toxic emissions.
He thinks that he's-- If you want the article,
it's in Smithsonian. >> One reason why we can't
switch to biodiesel is we don't have enough.
What if there's another way of doing things so that you
don't get the chance to do all the basic research you want to
do? >> I think that comes back to
someone's question before. We can not go down this road in
this center with a view that this is what we want to do in
15 years, and do it with blinders on.
We have a lot of money. We have a lot of expertise.
We need to be nimble. As technology changes, we need
to be able to shut down projects and ramp up new ones,
where they're most appropriate. Even if that means that Tim
gets no money out of this grant.
Right? I'm telling you what we're
doing with having money for eight weeks after we got
awarded the grant. How we're going to position
ourselves in five years. ( inaudible )
Basic research. I don't see it as big enough to
do what we really have to do. >> I don't disagree with that.
But you know, the federal government has only invested
money at this level in this science for all of eight weeks.
I'm talking about the November issue, and the guy is
a self-made engineer. But his ideas were taken to a
lot of engineers without their knowing that he was--
But then it also sounds like, without reading the article,
in order to capture that excitement you would have to
totally transform the whole auto industry.
And that hasn't proved to be the most nimble industry in the
world. >> Why hasn't GM done it,
if 90% of the parts used were GM products?
Right. >> That we have already.
Yes? >> I'm trying to get my head
around the billion tons that you started with and the
logistics involved in that kind of material handling on a
project. For scale, can you compare that
to the total volume of material handled by the U.S. paper and
pulp industry, in some order of magnitude?
So what I've been told is that paper and pulp processing
accounts for 300-400 million tons of it.
We're quadrupling the industrial infrastructure that
we currently use for paper and pulp?
And I'm also talking about potentially processing it in a
different way. I'm talking about processing it
locally. Because if I've got to take a
tree from here to Nebraska, where the ethanol plant is, the
cost equation by energy and dollars goes south, right?
Does that put you at odds with some of your industrial
partners? ADM probably wants you to
invent a giant megaplant to run the whole country.
My preference would be that you invent something that
individual dairy farmers can use.
ADM is still buried in a lot of feedstocks that they can get
locally. The northern part of the state
is likely going to be buried in things that they can get
locally to provide fuels. ADM can probably live, I'm not
an economist. We should get Randy Fortenberry
in here to talk about this. But ADM can probably continue
to live because their cost per unit of the product that they
make is such that their transportation cost in is okay.
This is likely going to be, if it's ethanol based, this is
likely going to need to be a leaner, greener industry for a
significant amount of time. Because ethanol now is at best
marginal by the people who want you to believe it's okay, even
with government price supports. You can change that break even
point if you process it locally.
My friends in engineering tell me 100-mile radius, 50-mile
radius. Don't have anything go.
Have a plant every 50 miles. I don't know where those
numbers come from, but I'm quoting them.
I like my engineers. They tend to be very dogmatic
and give me those numbers because they've run the models.
But that number is constantly going to change, every time the
price of a barrel of oil changes.
If it goes up, your radius may get different.
If it goes down, your radius may get different.
I don't think it's going down like it was after the Arab oil
crisis of the '70s. So all of these equations, all
of these formulations are totally changing.
I've been an advisor for DoE on a lot of programs for the last
ten years. Five years ago, they never
would have rolled this out because the economics weren't
there. But given where the price of
the barrel of oil is going, and given the interest of society
in biodefense and energy security, this became a
palatable set of things to do for the current decision makers
in Washington. I think economically and
environmentally and health wise, it makes a huge amount of
sense, as well. >> Is part of your proposal
then, does it include an emphasis on processing
conversions aimed at a scale appropriate to a 50-mile
radius, as opposed to big scale projects?
Not in the first five years. We're still just trying to
figure it out in Tim's lab at the University of Wisconsin.
We have partners that if we can get there faster, are ready to
give us part of their line to test our technology in a real
refining and processing standpoint.
When we build this new building, we're having a
dialogue now of how much activity in our building should
be planned to deal with activities at a scale that are
bigger than what Tim would normally do in his lab.
And there's going to be some amount of it, but I can't
project really what we're going to be doing in three to five
years on campus. Maybe we need to be doing that
in a research park. Maybe we need to be doing it
with our partners. But we don't have activities at
that scale in here yet. We're still doing things in
small scale. Yes?
Ultimately, this is all sunlight that we're harvesting,
essentially. >> Sunlight and CO2 in the
atmosphere, that's correct. >> If I remember right,
sunlight sort of perfectly converted is about a kilowatt
per square meter. When you go through this level
of transition and such to convert it into some kind of
fuel, how small does it get converted?
How inefficient or efficient is it?
The efficiency of solar energy capture, if you look at
the early events, which is what I cut my teeth on when I was in
Illinois, is quantum. It's almost 100% efficient.
It's the rest of the biology and what they do with the
energy where you get a big loss.
So are we going to be able to retool cells to radically
change that efficiency? I'm not going there.
I think at best, if there's a superhighway that the CO2 moves
in in a plant to go certain places, our goal is to direct
it to certain places in the superhighway that are more
energy rich for us to capture, whether it's in microbes or in
plants. The sunlight question is an
interesting question for another reason.
If you look at the amount of sunlight that hits the planet
in a year, and compare that to the amount of sunlight that
currently goes into the energy grid, either from solar panels
or from the biomass that we currently use, it equates to
one hour's worth of sunlight out of a 365 day year.
So we have a huge potential increase in utilization of
sunlight to a source energy. In this country, one-tenth of
one percent of our energy comes from sunlight.
This is an opportunity, not to take sunlight directly via
solar panels, but to capture sunlight and use it to generate
energy that we can use for other means.
So there's a huge impact. It's one of the free things we
get. That and wind.
I'm still not clear what the effected efficiency is in terms
of capturing sunlight with this.
I don't think we're going to change that efficiency.
We have what we have. But what we have, as
inefficient as it is, still gives us a billion tons of
cellulose that we could get at every year.
That's a fact. I don't think we're going to
retool biology enough to really get at increasing the
efficiency of plants to use that light.
But how much energy that's captured in that biomass are we
actually going to be able to extract?
This doesn't just magically turn into energy.
That depends how much of the cellulose I can get access to,
and how much of it I can turn into oils.
And I can't give you an answer to that, either, because we're
not there. >> Any more questions?
Going once? Yes, sir?
How about potatoes as a source of biofuels?
Well you saw we had starch in there.
So we're not going to outsource all of our energy to Ireland,
but there is a potential to train plants to accumulate
starch in their leafy tissue, just like we want to train them
to accumulate oils. And that is something that we
can easily degrade. So I doubt if we'll be planting
potatoes all over the world to get at this.
But if we can train plants, breed plants to accumulate
starch in their stalks and in their leaves, we can access
that sugar very easily. >> You can talk to Tim
afterwards. >> Sure.
Thank you all very much. >> Thank you.
( applause )