107 Tim Donohue

>> 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)