Tonight, it's a real
here to talk with us about the pleasure to have Tim Donohue
Center. This talk was scheduled to beh
about four weeks ago, but he
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.
Department of Bacteriology. You can see the reflection of
Hiram Smith Hall in the beautiful new building of the
Microbial Sciences Building.
Wisconsin Bioenergy initiative. He got his Bachelor of Science
in 1975 from the Polytechnic
His Masters and PhD in 1980 Insfrom Penn State.yn.
He spent six years at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign in the microbiology department.
It's a pleasure to welcome
to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. ( applause )hue
Thanks, Tom.
And thank you, everybody, for having the patience to allow me
to go to Washington, DC.
to tell you about is funded Tby the Department of Energyng
to the tune of about
And so when they asked me to go to Washington, DC, I kind of
have to say yes.
Let's start out with a quiz. So how many of you--
about this at some level? How mSo some number. heard
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
And mostly from the cellulosic today and possibly tomorrow.
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
So given how proud we are of gotten.
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
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
equivalent of one of their view us as a national lab, the
You may have heard of Argonne, national labs.
some of their big national or Oak Ridge, or Los Alamos,
And so this is in essence, if you accept what they're saying,
bringing a national lab to the
That's different. Anyone know, is there another
national lab on campus? Yes?
Forest Products Lab.
actually a USDA Forestry >> Forest Products Lab is
And the last time we brought a Service national lab.
the USDA Forest Products Lab national lab to campus was when
Anyone except her know when wthat was?.
( laughter )
1910, so it's almost >> 1939?
So this doesn't happen around here very often.
And for all those reasons,
about it. I expect you to interrupt me.
If I don't get through
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
I'm talking about, just stop me. more details about what
everything, that's okay. If I don't get through
about how we got here. So what I want to do is talk
national lab here; who we are; How did we get to bring this
And if I have time at the end, what we're going to do.
talking about what we want to do on campus, in the state and
with our partners at UW-System
$25 million a year elephant to dois funded to do.this
Okay? So first, how did we get here?
How did the Department of Energy decide that they wanted
to set up bioenergy research
fuels from biomass. And in fact, they set up three
of them.
here. There's one that's centered in
the Berkeley area around
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
to spend $75 million a year on government decide they wanted
So the specific part of the story starts actually about two
years ago today.
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
And I make the case that there cellulosic part of biomass.
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.
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
stated about running our cars awith 30% ethanol in our gasve
tanks.
gas pump and you put fuel in Right now, if you pull up to a
ethanol. your car, it's about 10%
by at least three-fold. So And have everybody in thehat
country do it.
a huge amount of ethanol So in order to do that, we need
now. compared to what we're making
you already know, is leading And what we're making now, as
food versus fuel debate. a large so-called
sugars in corn kernels and Because we are taking the
Not because I think it's converting that into ethanol.
ethanol from my table in the scientifically wise to steal
chain, but because it's what we scientifically know how to do.
If we're going to make three
plant three times as much corn. tiWe don't have the land.n't
The land wouldn't sustain it. We need to find the sugars to
make that ethanol from
Well it turns out there's a large amount of plant sugars
that are either burned or used
now in the world and in the for no praccountry.rpose right
And that's the cellulosic part
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
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
What we need is the technology to realize this challenge.
convert it into fuels. to get it to cellulose and
Why is it so hard to get the So that's simple.
Who's wearing a cotton shirt? Your cotton shirt is made of
cellulose.
in the washing machine, does it When you pdissolve?otton shirt
No. That tells you that cellulose
does not dissolve in water. It's this insoluble polymer,
where the sugars are all
we need to release so that we buncan get the sugars out.hat
Once we get the sugars, life is easy.
We drive over to Milwaukee, you see Miller Brewing.
You know they know how to make
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
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.
different sugars, or a mixture It's going to be a mixture of
So we need to have processes at the downstream end as well
that are either chemical
those sugars into various or biologicalfuels.will convert
Right now, we work on a very
chain. single appetite ethanol food
we make ethanol out of it. We take one kind of sugar and
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
can generate fuels that way. that smorgasbord table so we
deal with the plants, and a downstream end to deal with the
conversion by microbes and
the plant material. So the game in this report was
to figure out strategies by which we could take biomass,
cellulose and other excess
burned or is waste, from both pcrops, again, not the kernelsy
of corn, the stalks and the ears, the stuff that we don't
eat.
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
Yes, ma'am? >> You talk about prairie grass
grows all by itself without fertilizing.
What about the effect of, if
grass, the grass that dies in ythe 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?
minutes, and I'll get there, >> So give me about 15 or 20
Of the three centers-- okay?
how sustainable will this whole new biomass-based economy be.
And the answer is we don't
Because we haven't invented it know.
But of the three centers, this yet.
that has any science proposed ceto address those questions.ne
So we can, as best as we can, predict what might happen
before Tim takes his crazy
greenhouse and puts it in the ideas fromfield.ab and the
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.
situation. I view myself in the following
remember President Kennedy When I was a little kid, I
moon." saying, "We want to go to the
President Kennedy saying we were taking a 747 from JFK
airport.
everything is focused about New I grew up York City.k City, so
But whether he said we were going to take a Mercury rocket
or whether he said we were
Apollo spacecraft with a lunar going to take a two-stage
So I view your question the lasame one as someone askingk.
John F. Kennedy, when he said,
how are we going to do it. "I want to go to the moon,"
the answer then, we don't have And just like he didn't have
That's not a cop-out. That's just a fact.
Okay? So the game is to take this
material and convert it into
Ethanol is all over the these newspapers.oducts.
Not because I think it's the
It has problems. best thing to add to fuel.
But it's what we know how to We can talk about that.
That's why we're doing it. make today.
basically making oil. MakinHydrocarbons.ch is
Making other energy sources.
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
of these products. make high-value chemistry out
So that's kind of how we got Okay?
So this report was released in here.
In August, 2007, in what I June, 2006.
federal government agreed with think is amazing speed, the
said we need this large, for everything we said in here, and
Manhattan style project. lack of a better word,
around this to do things. The Manhattan Project has all
sorts of connotations.
one. Going to the moon is a better
They issued a request for proposals to fund several
of these centers. And everyone all over the
country saw this and said,
five years. How are we going to play inr
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.
interface with the producers of grain and forestry material.
The governor now tells me we
producing state in the U.S. And close to 40% of the biomass
that can meet this billion ton
states on this map. cSo it made sense to put onee
of these centers here.
to get us funded? Is that aNo.ment going
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
And we decided as a campus, with the leadership of John
Wiley, the chancellor, and
decide how they were going to ostructure this proposal.y
They came to myself and one or
guys figure out what the best strategy is to try and get one
of these grants.
should go it alone and put in a proposal, I'm right there with
you.
partner with someone else in If that means that we should
in the country, to put the best tscience together, you can do
what you want to do.
we're not the lead institution If we partner and it means that
out of this $25 million, we're and we only get a few shekels
do good science here with still bwhatever we get.e we'll
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
wanted to team with whom, what email dialogues about who
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.
amount of similarity and We decided that we have a large
State University in East complements with Michigan
And we decided to put in a Lansing.
captured the scientific expertise mostly of these twot
centers.
going to fill out with some And whatother people. we were
By doing this, we buried
hotbed. We took advantage of the factl
that this region has the major
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.
people very interested in new uses for their farm products.
We have agricultural implement
here and over here ready to mhear 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.
map and strip it out from the IUnited States, the economy ofs
this region would be the third
behind the remainder of the laUnited States and Japan.d,
So when we make products, we
going to be ready to take it to have the market place.at are
So with that logic, we put
people. together tYes, sir?ing team of
It would occur to me that you're talking about how our
biomass is available in the country.
But right next door in Canada,
the forestry stuff they've got between all the agriculture and
significant amount that we going on, they've got to have a
Well, I don't know that we could essentially import.
like to export our technology want to impoto them.ut we would
Because any time you import something, you've got to track
it somehow, either on a truck or train.
And that costs you energy.
day, what we're going to see So I think at the end of the
a large variety of scaleable ten, 20 years down the road, is
Different technologies that work here, given the different
feedstocks that are going in. And those might be different
than the ones that work over
Okay? If we replace a single node
technology based on fossil
technology based on biofuels to get 20% of our fuel, let's say,
we are no better off than we
Because that will all sorts of were when we started.
People will want to try and constrplant corn up here.th it.
And that's not going to work, right?
We need to deal with a
Things that grow in Wisconsin daren't going to grow in.
Florida.
aren't going to grow in Things thWisconsin. Florida
So we need to be ready to diversify and do things locally
to try and get the best energy
we can. balanThat's where we are.ts as
Again, I can't tell you how.
I can't tell you how we're That's where I want to be, but
So our team includes us and it going to get there.
And if you look at the research budget the way the grant was
submitted, probably 80% of the
these two places. dWe filled out the program with
partnerships from Iowa State, from Illinois State University,
the University of Florida, Oak
Pacific Northwest National Lab Ridge National Lab, and the
We have a local company wayinvolved call Lucigentl.
Technologies, which is out in Middleton, right off the
Beltline. And I have WARF up here because
WARF, just like we are leading
Alumni Research Foundation, tis the group that handles alln
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
will come out of this center, ain a one stop shopping way.at
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
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
tech transfer, and that's to for intellectual property in
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
stacked up against almost a a ybillion dollars a year is
that the campus gets, and another $500 million
or $600 million over here.
like it's going to drive So as big as it is, it's not
campus. everyBut it says that this 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
things that prevent us from theconverting biomass into the
bioenergy.
of things as I go through this. We are doing fundamental, basic
discovery research in this
Both because we're in an center.
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
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
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.
last 20 years. My honeymoon is not going to
first five years will be We need, the report says the
The next five years will be funintegrating those researchh.
findings and seeing how it
refinery, in a corporate might work in the field or in a
The third five years are environment.
of that and really start to intbuild a new biofuels basedll
economy.
wants this to happen tomorrow. So there's a part of me that
going to happen for a while. But the sad thing is it's not
change how we do things in the We will make discoveries that
This total transformation is first year, two or three years.
of cellulose and efficiently needed to use that billion tons
going to happen over night. gJust like we didn't go to thet
moon six months after John F. Kennedy said I want us to go
there.
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
through some of these at the And I'm going to quickly go
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
plant biomass so that Tim's cotton shirt might dissolve
when he puts it in the washing
We need to change the cellulose or change the fuels.
And it could be that if that's
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
cotton should I put into into shirts, and how much
That could be what we're energy.
now. talking about 15 years from
But we clearly need to change I don't plant biomass.ould be.
The next thing is to process
sugars out of this cellulose. tThe 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
for those companies that want gotto take those products,ble
hopefully without government
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.
the Arab oil crisis Everyonin the early '70s.embers
Why didn't we do this in the
The answer is we started. Without going into the politics
of whether that was the right decision or not, we also
stopped.
better off today if we didn't And we might stop.heck of a lot
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
efficiently, we can do this a gheck of a lot better now thany
we ever could in 1970.
program that we're equally, if And the last part of the
set-aside budget specifically nofor education and outreach. a
And that's something that really resonates with two
Big Ten universities running
We are still paid by the this center.
Wisconsin and the governor of governoMichigan.state of
I work for the university.
though I'm at their beck and I don't work for the DoE, even
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
manufacturers, or the husband and housewife from Milwaukee
who might want to take some of
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
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.
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
in the future, and career topportunities for people.fe
So before I launch off into science, are there any other
questions about where I've
Yes? been?
The question is what's the ( inaudible )
the other two biofuel centers. relationship between us and
hand-in-hand singing, Are "Kum By Ya"?ward
Are we in direct competition? Where are we?
To this day, I have not seen
centers. the other proposals of the
they're doing. So I don't know exactly what
information. That's confidential
dialogues and presentations Tthat we've made with other
people in the room about what we're going to do.
There is a large amount of
that is not going on anywhere science in else.hree centers
There is an interest by the agency and by the scientists
for us to share information in
be brought to the marketplace aand move this train forward as
fast as we can. Are there some things that we
each might be thinking about
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
that are going on in the three strengths and the approaches
( inaudible ) That's true.
But there's also already--
an issue of how we do this in the future if patent revenue is
generated.
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
the IT people in the other conversations between WARF and
when we're going to collaborate and bring technology forward.y
You know, we're not there yet.
you're worried about. BI want to prevent it as at
scientist.
taxpayer, because I don't want I want to prevent it as a
the same $25 million a year $7science in three centers. do
That would be kind of stupid. There actually is a
Congressional mandate that when federal agencies fund research,
they do not fund duplicative
So the agency who has read all research.
blood that there is not direct three proposals has signed in
in these centers. They haven't directed us to get
out of this game and move into
And they have the right to do another gamethat.use of that.
Yes?
the Forest Products Lab? >> Will you be partnering with
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
labs of the USDA Forest oProducts and Dairy Forage Labn
centers, to take advantage of unique expertise that's there.
They are also allowed to embed
labs in our center. We are prevented, by federal
mandate, from using DoE funded
directly support the salaries monof USDA employees.to
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.
other people, they could not be And agetting money from us.g to
Yes?
interference from the state of >> Is there political
Is there a political Wisconsin to Michigan?
Wisconsin and Michigan? inIn fact, there is politicalof
love from both states.
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
in a letter in the proposal. announcement of what he had put
committed to helping build And that is, that he is
campus with $50 million $of state funds to house thes
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
activities related to biofuels add specifically to the
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
commitment from the governor to Miincrease faculty presence inr
this area at the MSU campus,
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
And they choked at the size of support from the state.
ultimately agreed to. But to a person, they said this
is the best thing we have seen
State Street in a very long coming frtime.is end of
Because it hits all sectors of
It hits the businesses in Milwaukee and Green Bay.
It hits the corn and soy bean farmers in this part of the
state.
the economy in the northern It hitspart of the state.le and
So they are very, very happy
Yes? that we have gotten this.
through the university with its >> Is theoverhead?ministered
Yes.
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
number four up there. tWhat 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?
to have practices that decrease water quality or decrease airt
quality.
bad problem for another either We have just traded one really
that's worse than the one that really bad problem or one
One of the challenges of we got rid of.
can do the processes you want sustaito do at a cost...r you
There's economic and
That's right. eSo things may fail from the.
economic standpoint, especially if the government says we don't
want to price support any of
The government is underwriting this.
underwrite milk, corn and everything else right now, or
else our gas would be even
They're talking about getting out of that business.
Does the sustainability determination include the cost
benefit relationship between
in to get an amount of energy the amount ofout?rgy that goes
It'll include everything
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.
greenhouse gases in the air, to how it will affect social
behavior. Land prices and market values.
We're going to try and capture
and use that to build models as much information as we can,
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
people's behavior. it'll do to farm prices and
You haven't talked much about what types of interaction
with industry, what the grant says about that.
Are you expecting that
some investments from other eventuallysources?be getting
We're kind of fighting
and running. them off until we get up
lists all the companies that I have a slide at the end that
want to be partners. have already approached us that
interfacing with industry. So we have several ways of
board that includes academic We have a scientific advisory
in the marketplace. leSome of them are obvious.ers
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
but they wouldn't necessarily frobe so obvious to others.t,
Like the chief of fermentations at Miller Brewing.
I'll come back to what I said before.
If there's anyone in the state
make a lot of ethanol, it's of Wisconthose folks.ws how to
He is psyched about being on
Because they throw away a huge our scientific advisory board.
stream, every day when they amount of make beer.anic waste
And if they can use what we're
material and turn it into fuel going to invent to take that
have a much more sustainable and heat their plants, they
economically makes sense building, which for them,
power from MG&E. because they need to buy less
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 )
We have a collaborators network of people who are talking about
wanting to partner with us
that we're doing that resonate because of the specific things
strategy is to move into this with what area. corporate
We're beginning to talk to them with WARF and our IP people in
the room, so that whatever
they're structured properly. those conversations are,
at any level. Here's a specific project that
I think we could work with and
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
And we're talking about all of pick.
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?
working research group on campus, like other people part
of the center, this national
day-to-day operations? lab, how does that change your
life! >> It'( laughs )screwed up my
What will that mean to people?
It's a very interesting and important question.
I don't know how many people
my shoes every day, or my know wcolleagues shoes.live in
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
in three or five-year slugs. the federal government mostly
I've got to write this ugly Athing called a renewal thatr,
gets me funded for another
And Uncle Sam usually doesn't come in and say after six
months, what did you do; after
You're meaning to file a report, a year, what did you do.
and say, well you didn't they never really come in
we're not going to give you reallthat much money.done,
So we live in three to five year increments, okay.
The DoE has said to us
to run more like a startup correctly that they want this
They want us to think about them being a big venture
capital firm that's given this
year for five years. startup company $25 million a
what are we going to do in the And they want us to think about
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
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
program is doing so much better and the technology's going and
it's focused. And that is the way it should
run.
shut down because we just hired Or Tim's proTom. may need to
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
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.
exploratory and maybe high-risk and more, we're going to have
to evaluate.
is if I go and hire somebody, I Butmay not know with this newme
grant that's funded for five
him or her for five years. years, I don't have funding for
face after a year and tell him I may have to look him in the
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
And graduate students take graduate students.
years to get done. four, five or five-and-a-half
they're doing what graduate Anstudents should do.ar,
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.
trying to figure out about how So there's a tension that we're
done with senior people and people who already have a PhD,
and how much of it should be
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
of how much of this activity in an interesting way in terms
students. can and shoYes?be done by
What sector, such as the oil
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
One big example is, BP funded maa center to do very similary.
things to what these three
are doing, to the tune federally funded centers
for ten years. of $50 million a year
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
This is a quote. anything from anybody.
They said we don't like to buy We interviewed with BP.
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
of the equation to get into wrenewable 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
they want their economic this game a different way if
Yes? viability to be maintained.
you know, like from algae or >> How about vegetable oils,
It's not a part of this wcenter.?
We are doing what the donor said they wanted us to do in
the request for proposals.
around generating ethanol from This proposal was focused
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
amount of expertise in plant bring to the table a large
And one of the things that we are focused on in this area is
how do we train plants to take
oils. And have that oil depositedo
throughout the whole plant, instead of only in seeds, like
soy beans put it in seeds.
20% of the total carbon Ithroughout the stalk and theo
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.
be squeezed, the oil would come Anout of it, and it would bely
ready to be mixed with
put in your car. petroleum at the pump head and
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
generating hydrogen from a program down here in
to generate electricity. sunlight, and then using that
lot of interest in biodiesel, Bwhich is basically oil, from
algae.
in the call for proposals. That is not part of what was
We have other programs we're We're not there.
umbrella of this other thing trying to roll out under 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 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
of cellulose, tseveral hundred million tons
of that sits on Forest Service
harvested by currently approved lamanagement plans. be
We're not talking about strip and burn.
We're talking about what the
harvest. government has said they can
today, but those are the plots And they can't harvest it
forest fires that cost the of land that typically create
last year to fight. So if we can manage how to get
our hands on that excess
government ten times more than forestry, we could save the
centers every year to do this. they're putting into these
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
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.
function in isolation. And no section is going to
integrated fashion, where We'people in this group are an
talking to that group.
here are known about by the people who are going to process
them next.
advantage of big science, of By doing that, that's an
hands of me, or one group of having all of this money in the
Because we can leverage technologies that we're all
working on together.
think big science is great. ThAnd although I'm running aI
really big science program, I think there are advantages to
this, but I think we will go
society, we continue to fund down the wrong road if as a
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.
Kool-Aid on big science, I So if you think I've drank the
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
And about half of our budget is in these two bowls.
We're not going and doing this
think are going to solve the right away in plants that I
We're not doing it in poplar, bwhich is everyone's favorite.
tree, if you read the Scientific American
We're not doing it in switchgrass, or miscanthus,
which is everyone's favorite
We're doing it in model systems because they give us entry
points to find out the
to do this. iAnd 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
They have specific sugars in different types of cellulose.
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
is much easier where you make one at a time
when they're making them all than teasing how they're made
So we're focusing on models, together.
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.
these. Again, I talked about a lot of
We have a lot of robots, not We have a lot of people.
but because robots can process because we don't like people,
my best graduate student can. aAnd if you want to get quick
answers to questions, you need
what's going to work well fast, tand then focus on a fewut
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
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.
to figure out how to take them Once we get the plants, we need
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
We have programs to analyze a wide range of plant materials.
Because in the future, the
Mississippi aren't going to be plants they're going to use in
to grow for biofuels in North the same plDakota.ey're going
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
And we need enzymes or pretreatment conditions.
help us break down this stuff cataand use for sugars.g to
So we need to look at a whole bunch of different
pretreatments.
to work with the previous And this indgroup. it's going
We need to understand what's
I kept talking about the fact that when we degrade these
polymers, the game is to get
Because the wonderful microbes sugars.
and convert them into fuel. tBut not everything that comess
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
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
We need enzymes. converted.
cartoons. It illustrates how we need to
go on bioprospecting mission. We need to look in different
ecosystems for novel enzymes
shirt. that will help degrade my
high-temperature detergents to Just like when you add
in there that work at high your clothes, there are enzymes
stains out. temIt's the same concept.the
People have been looking for a
They haven't found great ones long time foyet.ese enzymes.
They also haven't interrogated
out there. all of the ecosystems that are
that we have, is we have a So one of the unique things
colleague of mine in partnership thanks to a
give a great talk some day, bacteriology,Tom. I think will
He was here already?
ants. So you've already heard aboutg
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
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
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
this country that's making every fermentation plant in
insulin, everything else. Because of the sheer amount of
enzyme that we need.
within a factor of two. ThOne solution to that is to's
train plants to actually make these enzymes in the plant.
And have them be asleep when
when they're harvested, do the plants are growing and then
heat them up. Have the enzyme wake up ande
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
build out all sorts of new the antibiotic industry or
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.
There's a little bit of Aactivity 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
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
that's been very successful in and optimization technology
work on our platform microbes the like yeast and E. coliy to
and some others.
the street in chemical We also have a fellow across
Dumesic, who has pioneered work enfor how to take plant sugarsm
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
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
be easy for us to get microbes pipeline that aren't going to
But chemistry can do that. to convert right away.
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
economically viable and lenvironmentally responsible.
To make sure, as best as we can, we're carbon neutral, or
we mitigate greenhouse gas
And we maintain water quality, emissions.
pest suppression. bIf you look at where we'red
going to have an effect, the
is higher agricultural green stuff here is where there
And this is actually a activity.
It's very grain-centric. misnomer.
forestry in the state. All this red stuff here is the
ruin everything that's green on So if we dothis map.ng, we will
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.
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
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.
curve. It's getting out ahead of the
to worry about this for five or Theten years down the road.ed
But what we convinced them, is
before we start putting stuff we needin the land.ta now,
And so we're going to look at a variety of model agricultural
crops, from prairies up to
The importance for that is that these are annuals.
These require high nitrogen, a
very diverse. lot oThese are low-input. not
They don't require fertilizer.
come back every year. TheyAnd we're going to starthey
testing their behavior on replicated plots here and in
the state of Michigan at the
elsewhere throughout the upper Kellogg Biological Station, and
So when we're ready to put Midwest with our collaborators.
data on all of these things. stuff in the field, we have
plants interact in the soil, We have data on how microbes in
what makes healthy soil. what makes healthy microbes and
that soil, biodiversity. We have data on geochemistry in
per acre and variation. WWe have data on farm use ande
design, regional and national impact.
We have data on economic
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.
farm work, but a lot of This is a smodeling.t amount of
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.
But I know how much we asked It's not out of our budget.
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
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.
is talking about these programs Cwe have to train tomorrow'st
leaders while we solve today's
This includes workshops and educational models for
scientists at all levels, starting at K-12.
We have a whole communications
How many of you listen to Larry Mueller on Wednesdays at noon?
Okay. Once a month, Larry now has a
bioenergy interview.
The dean has been there. I've been there.
there. People from Michigan have been
there. People from the state have been
It was today. WeWho did he have today?R.
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
We're going to have in this new building a bioenergy discovery
center, so that people
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
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.
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.
easiest one, attracting And tgraduate students. the
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.
how many young people there are in the field that want to work
in this space and get trained.
things while I've been here, I've done a lot of really fun
for that reason alone, to be but this is got the potential,
I've ever done. one So I'm going to shut up,hat
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.
companies like Miller and Iogen, that are already on the
scientific advisory board.
come along more recently, like Some of them are ones that have
are two big plant biotech Syngenta companies.to, which
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
and I can't." But if you get funded, we'll
be in touch.
And that's totally legitimate. And they're in touch.
amount of local interest in You knohaving these.a large
And now that it's clear who's funded, people are going to one
center, or to multiple centers
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.
learning how to do. So I want to thank you, see if
you have any other questions, and wish everyone a happy
holiday.
Yes? ( applause )
milestones? >> >> As of 4:00 yesterdayonth
afternoon, we have approved funding for all 40 of these
projects. And every one of them have
six-month and one-year
Yes. milestones.
Do you have any concerns Yes?
these pressures that you were describing could interfere with
the doing of basic science? >> No, because the agency has
been very clear.
basic science to get things Funding thesedone.ers to do the
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
in a year. we're going to get this solved
society looks out in ten years I think that as a taxpayer, if
these centers at $75 million a and say, we've funded three of
gotten anything done, then I year total, and we haven't
beef to question whether this thihas been a reasonablemate
investment. But I just don't think that's
going to happen as long as
expectations. How long have we said we're
going to cure cancer? Right?
Even how far down on a
fizzles. pathway you can get and it
There's a large amount of this >> Absolutely.
And everyone in the agency that I've talked to is acutely aware
of that.
need to go downtown and justify Buto Congress why this moneyo
makes sense.
I remember another huge distributed project that came
into competition with some
the Genome Project. Is there any policy in effects
that incorporate those potential
race the federally funded compprojects to their goals?will
So are there mechanisms in
corporate driven science to get pthis done and federally funded
science to get this done? I think there are protections
built in in what we've already
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
Department of Energy. So they want to make sure that
when we're giving technology
on an even playing field. ouWe're not favoring any onet
company, because they happen to be on our scientific advisory
board.
competition is good. I think some amount of
quote of mine in Nature Biotechnologyite
from September, by a vice president for biofuels
from Sonoco, which is another large oil company that's moving
in this area very aggressively
And his quote is, "I would in the academic sector.
area to a great young assistant professor in the universitys
than have my corporate
we should strategically iposition ourselves to do the
right science." Given where I work, I really
like that quote.
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
marketplace. get that technology to the
Yes? I'm a big believer in that.
Given what you know, and what you think you know at this
point, which of the five
will come through first? major things do you think
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
So I think we're going to mget a lot of early bangh?
for the buck out of what I call deconstruction,
because there's a certain amount
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
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,
I think we have in the short and what we have built into it,
for the buck, I think we're tgoing to get a significants
amount of bang here.
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
They already have two products biomass about three years ago.
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
the road. We will make some incremental
improvements in how to get more ethanol out down here.
And Jim Dumesic is phenomenal.
give him to help his program, Twhich has been kind of cobbled
together. He's had good funding,
but not at this level.
give him, and get him involved The amount of money that we can
organic chemists to make new with some really good discovery
pay dividends there. processes, I think is going to
ethanol production in E. coli I and yeast will make someh
incremental things. I think the plant stuff is
going to be a little slow.
microbiologist and I'm down on Not because I'm a
grow. plants, but pOkay? take time to
Even in a greenhouse. So that means we have to be
more strategic in what we're
we want to modify plants. goiAnd when I talked to thehow
agribusiness people, I'm
They say to me, you give me a gplant that you think is great,
you've got to realize it's
get that in the field. going to take me ten years to
that you think is great, you So before you give me a plant
great. better really know that it's
me two years later and say that I doyou have a better plant. to
Because that costs a lot of money.
So I think the plant work,
we can make oils, and a large althbang if we can do softer if
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
But how that relates to what we want to do is going to depend
on what comes down out of this
Yes? end of the pipeline.
divided by three million >> I was thinking $75 million
year per person. people, that's like 25 cents a
right? That's not going to break us,
year? >> This makes a lot of sense to
me for a variety of reasons.
is we're going to run out of The biggest one in my opinion,
Compared to what we spend. stuff at some point.
and we have to start using coal and shale, we're going to have
more of a greenhouse gas problem
So we are in essence doing an experiment with this planet
that we only get to do once,
fuels. until we run out of fossil
we're going to do something Sobefore the clock ticks onhow
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
impact of our energy habits is address the environmental
impact on healthcare costs in this country, compared to
anything else.
care about this and the healthcare industry would care
about this if that fact is
There's environmental issues true.
real, and I'm a big proponent that are reof that.itimate and
And there's these geopolitical
I can tell you what the preamble of that report says as
the reason we're doing this.
least four or five very good But I would say there are at
done. reasons why Yes? needs to be
I can understand that the mission is to do basic
research. But if you take five or ten
years to get that part done,
biodiesel, that's the diesel what is to say that the
in Europe won't be put into engcars and trucks and make 60
Hummers go 60 miles per gallon, and not have toxic effects on
the air that they put out?
90% of GM products and doing I read about a guy who's taking
their diesel engines and with his way of adding some energyf
to take care of the toxic emissions.
He thinks that he's-- If you want the article,
it's in Smithsonian.
switch to biodiesel is we don't >> One have enough.e can't
What if there's another way of doing things so that you
don't get the chance to do all
do? >> I think that comes back too
someone's question before.
this center with a view that We can not go down this road in
15 years, and do it with this is what we want to do in
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?
doing with having money for Ieight weeks after we gote
awarded the grant.
ourselves in five years. How we're going to position
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
But then it also sounds like, without reading the article,
in order to capture that
totally transform the whole excitemauto industry.have to
And that hasn't proved to be
world. the most nimble industry in the
if 90% of the parts used >> Why hasn't GM done it,
Right. were GM products?
Yes? >> That we have already.
around the billion tons that >> I'm trying to get my head
logistics involved in that kind of material handling on a
project.
to the total volume of material Fhandled by the U.S. paper andt
pulp industry, in some order
So what I've been told is that paper and pulp processing
accounts for 300-400 million
We're quadrupling the industrial infrastructure that
we currently use for paper and
And I'm also talking about pulp?
different way. potentially processing it in a
locally. I'm talking about processing it
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
ADM is still buried in a lot use.
locally. of feedstocks that they can get
is likely going to be buried in Thethings that they can getate
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
make is such that their transportation cost in is okay.
This is likely going to be, if
likely going to need to be a it's ethanol based, this is
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
radius. meDon't have anything go.le
Have a plant every 50 miles.
numbers come from, but I'm I don't know where those
I like my engineers. quoting them.
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
If it goes up, your radius changes.
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.
would have rolled this out Five years ago, they never
there. because the economics weren't
the barrel of oil is going, and given the interest of society
in biodefense and energy
palatable set of things to do for the current decision makers
in Washington.
environmentally and health wise, I think economically and
sense, as well. >> Is part of your proposal
then, does it include an
conversions aimed at a scale emphasis on processing
radius, as opposed to big scale approprprojects? 50-mile
Not in the first five years.
figure it out in Tim's lab We're still just trying to
We have partners that if we can aget 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
dialogue now of how much building, we're having a
be planned to deal with aactivities at a scale that are
bigger than what Tim would
And there's going to be some normally do in his lab.
project really what we're going to be doing in three to five
years on campus.
in a research park. MMaybe we need to be doing itt
with our partners.
that scale in here yet. BuWe're still doing things inat
small scale.
Ultimately, this is all sunlight that we're harvesting,
essentially.
atmosphere, that's correct. >>> If I remember right,he
sunlight sort of perfectly
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
energy where you get a big and what they do with the
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,
plants. wThe sunlight question is anin
interesting question for
If you look at the amount of another reason.
in a year, and compare that to sunlight that hits the planet
currently goes into the energy the amount of sunlight that
or from the biomass that we gcurrently use, it equates tos
one hour's worth of sunlight
So we have a huge potential increase in utilization of
sunlight to a source energy.
one percent of our energy comes In this from sunlight.enth of
This is an opportunity, not to
solar panels, but to capture take sunlight directly via
energy that we can use for sunlight and use it to generate
So there's a huge impact. It's one of the free things we
get.
I'm still not clear what the That and wind.
of capturing sunlight with effected efficiency is in terms
I don't think we're going to this.
We have what we have. chBut what we have, as.
inefficient as it is, still gives us a billion tons of
cellulose that we could get at
That's a fact. every year.
retool biology enough to really I dget at increasing theg to
efficiency of plants to use that light.
But how much energy that's
actually going to be able to captured in that biomass are we
This doesn't just magically turn into energy.
That depends how much of the
and how much of it I can turn cellulose into oils.access to,
And I can't give you an answer
not there. to that, either, because we're
Going once? >> AnyYes, sir?stions?
How about potatoes as a source of biofuels?
Well you saw we had starch
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
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.
( applause >> Thank you.
)