University Place Madison City Channel Presents Wisconsin Academy Presents Tim Donohue, "What's Driving My Car? 2050 Biofuels and Other Sustainable Energy Sources" 3/16/2010   cc >> Margaret Lewis: Hello, everyone. I'm Margaret Lewis, executive director of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters, and we're just so delighted that you could all join us tonight for the Wisconsin Academy's 2050 Pioneering the Future series and our presentation tonight, "What's Driving My Car? 2050 Biofuels and Other Sustainable Energy Sources." Tonight's presentation is made possible by the Pleasant Rowland Foundation and our generous sponsors, the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, the Evjue Foundation, M&I Bank, the University of Wisconsin-Madison Chancellor's Office, and Isthmus Publishing Company. And also, cable channel 12, our media partner here tonight. We thank them for their support. The Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters is an independent nonprofit organization founded in 1870 that isn't funded by the state or the university, so we are very grateful for all of our sponsors and supporters. These presentations are intended to provide a forum for the exchange of ideas on many different topics and we hope the discussion will continue after tonight's presentation. I encourage you to send us your thoughts and comments. I think on your way in you've all received a yellow card, which I am supposed to hold up and remind you to fill out, that gives us ideas for other speakers and topics that you'd like to hear about and gives us some idea about how you learned about tonight's presentation. Also on your way out, I think there is a sheet. If you enjoyed this presentation and would want to view it again or share it with others, there's a schedule for when it will be re-broadcast this weekend. 

Let me tell you just a little bit about a couple of other things that are coming up. I should also remind you that if you fill out this card, you are eligible for a drawing, for a couple of the books that have been written by other Academy Evening speakers. This one, "Uncommon Defense," is our next month's speaker John Hall, who will be speaking on technology and warfare and the warfare and public perception on April 20, so we hope that you might all come back and join us. Your membership dollars go toward arranging events like this and the one tonight, and we do need your support. So if you do like what you see, again, please feel free to fill out a card, fill out an envelope to join the Wisconsin Academy, which you can do for just $25. We hope that you will think about doing that. One of the main benefits of membership is receipt of a Wisconsin People & Ideas magazine, our quarterly magazine. You can see this one features our speaker tonight, Tim Donohue. And if you join tonight, special deal, a bonus. You'll receive a copy of this magazine if you join tonight in addition to your regular subscription and it has some additional background material about the topic this evening. 

So before you leave tonight, I'll leave you with a couple more announcements about some of the other programs of the Wisconsin Academy. If you want to learn more about the Wisconsin Academy, please come to our website, wisconsinacademy.org and learn about all our programs, the magazine, the lecture series, the public forums, the gallery here in the Overture Center. Now, I have the opportunity to introduce our speaker on behalf of the Wisconsin Academy of Science, Arts and Letters this evening, Professor Tim Donohue. Tim is a professor of bacteriology who has been a faculty member at UW-Madison for about 24 years. During this time, his research program has focused on solar energy, the utilization by photosynthetic bacteria, studying the process and control of photosynthesis and how cells divert the energy captured from sunlight into different pathways. Donohue has been a member of various federal research panels, has served on several editorial boards and advisory committees in microbiology, and has helped author reports for the Department of Energy on solar energy generation and the conversion of plant biomass into biofuels. He has experience in leading cross-disciplinary research programs like the National Institute of General Medical Sciences and the Biotechnology Training Program. Recently he was named head of the new Department of Energy funded by the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center at UW-Madison. So please join me in welcoming Tim Donohue. Thank you, Tim. 

(applause)  >> Tim Donohue: I want to thank Margaret for the wonderful introduction and the Academy for inviting me to come and talk to you all. It's really an honor every time I get to speak about the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center, but it's particularly an honor when you get to do it in your own backyard to talk to your neighbors and friends. Because it's really the support of this community and this institution and the state, down the street, that has really put the infrastructure and the scientific horsepower in place at UW-Madison to allow us to capture a grant like this in what we see as a very important area for the state, the country and the world. So thank you. I guess I should say one other thing. As a faculty member, usually when you start a lecture or a course, you remind people that this is Bacteriology 101 and they're not in a psychology course. This is not the Willie Nelson concert, for those of you who are looking for some other type of entertainment, it's down the hall. (laughter) This is what I'm going to try and do tonight before I open it up for questions and I'm going to try and put what we're doing in the Bioenergy Center in a larger context, which is a context driven around how society and this country and this state is trying to capture and utilize renewable energy as a way of diversifying the energy grid. In doing that, I'm going to quickly go through some overview graphics about where we currently get and use our energy, how it flows from the suppliers to the users, and then I'm going to actually spend most of my time talking about biofuels, which I would define as energy sources that have a biological source. One could claim that fossil fuels had a biological source because at some point the dinosaurs or other bio organisms, biological systems gave up their life and their remains is now what's generating those fuels for us, but we're talking about things that have had a little more recent past on the planet than the dinosaurs. 

I'm going to spend a fair amount of time talking about how Great Lakes Bioenergy, as an example of a biofuels activity, fits in the biofuel picture and then I'm going to close with a couple of statements that I think pick up on Great Lakes Bioenergy and illustrate why this is such a great time to be doing this, both for the state and the region and the country as a whole. Because as we are successful, I think you'll be able to see that the types of technology that we're developing at Great Lakes Bioenergy will be able to help us in the transportation sector, but will also be able to help us in other parts of our daily lives. Before I get rolling, I want to make a couple of disclaimers up front. The first is that in anticipation of a wonderful question, we are about generating new types of energy or liquid transportation fuels in Great Lakes Bioenergy. If I don't say it later on, we are all about conservation as well. The more we conserve, the easier you make my job, okay? I'm probably not going to say too much else about conservation, but don't take that as a sign that I don't care about conservation. The second is, when I actually talk about what's going on in Great Lakes Bioenergy, if I don't say it often enough, I want to lead with the point that we are developing technology that has the potential to reshape how we generate energy on this planet. I want to make sure you hear the word "potential." We are doing basic research to evaluate whether the types of systems that we're studying can be used as energy sources. We don't have it figured out yet. We don't have an integrated system and we don't have a product. 

But we're evaluating the potential for different types of sustainable, renewable energy sources, okay? Those are my disclaimers up front. If we now move on and we look at where we get energy in the energy grid. This is a slide that I have shamelessly stolen from this report, which was part of a Nobel Prize-winning team. It breaks down how much of the energy we get from oil, coal, or gas. So these three pieces of the pie are basically fossil fuel derived. Biomass, which is the focus of tonight's conversation, nuclear and then the small players, hydro, wind, geothermal and solar, in 2007. So you see the major part of the pie, some 80% of it is fossil fuel derived. When I say diversifying the energy grid, I am talking about trying to see if we can slice this pie and share it differently. I am not saying that biomass is going to replace that 80%. I'm just trying to make that piece a little bigger so that we can save the fossil fuels for things that we absolutely need it for, or save it for our grandchildren, okay? If we now look at where that energy goes, you'll see about a quarter of it goes into buildings, a quarter of it goes into industry, and about 20% of the energy grid goes into the transportation sector, cars, long-haul trucks, airplanes, boating, if you like to boat on Lake Mendota, etc. 

And about a third of it is lost. There's the conservation piece, if I don't say it again. If we can tighten up that piece of the pie, we can use less energy. But I'm not going to talk about that tonight. But that's just the facts. Those are two big-picture ways of where we get our energy from and what we're using it for. Great Lakes Bioenergy has a mandate to shrink the amount of energy that is derived from fossil fuels in that piece of the pie right now, specifically to work on the transportation sector. Another way of looking at this supply and use picture is to line up all of those suppliers that I did on the pie chart on the left side, and then compare it to what we're using it for. So if you take something like oil, you can see, this is where all the oil goes. Most of it goes into the transportation sector. 

Jet planes, diesel, automotives. You can do the same thing for each of these, and I'm not going to walk through it for you, but what you get is a very complicated --. You can see how much of different energy sources go to different pieces. What I want you to focus on is the biomass piece, the topic of tonight's talk, the green bars. You'll see that a lot of that goes into buildings, that's so-called first generation biofuels. We heat our house with wood in Wisconsin in the winter, if we have a wood stove, okay? Or we heat a lot of factories burning biomass. And a little bit of it goes into industry, but there's very little of it that goes into the transportation grid right now. Even if you think about the ethanol that you put into your car, it's not big enough to show a line here, okay? But this is going to change in the future and it's going to change in the future because of a bill that was passed by the US congress in 2007 called the Renewable Fuels Energy Independence and Security Act, or ISA. This bill issued a strong challenge for the liquid transportation sector. Because it said, by the year 2020, we want to diversify how we're putting liquid fuels into our gas tanks. 

If we look at what it was like in 2007, there was about 5 billion gallons of biofuel, and most of that came from corn ethanol. By 2020, congress has said, we want to have close to 35 billion gallons of biofuel. We're only going to let corn ethanol go up to about 15 gallons or so and plateau and then there's this green piece that's going to come in called cellulosic biofuels and we're going to talk about what that means later on. There's a little bit in biodiesel. There was very little in 2007. They hope to have a couple of hundred million by 2010, and depending on technology, that may go up to be a little more by 2022 and there may be some other sources. This act really put a charge into the US government to say, if we're going to generate this much liquid transportation fuel from biological sources and we're not going to do it from corn ethanol, for a variety of legitimate reasons, we need to figure out how we're going to do this. This biomass to biofuel infrastructure was initiated by the previous administration because they wanted us to be more energy independent as we looked at how we're funding or sourcing the transportation sector. Clearly, it's continued to be supported by the current administration. So we've lived in a space where it's had high-level support from two administrations. 

There was an election in there that changed who lived there and it's got support from both sides. I think it's going to continue to have support. If you look at biofuels, if I was giving a lecture, a Biofuels 101 lecture, these would be the types of molecules or fuels you could think about defining as biofuels. We already talked about one, which is the ethanol that you put in your gas tank when you pull up to it today. This is mostly generated from cornstarch, the kernels of corn that we eat. So this is today's technology. There's a potential to generate oils or hydrocarbons in biodiesel, in different plants or microbes. Biofuels that we currently use a lot of and will hopefully use a lot more in Madison are wood or pelletized biomass. The state and university are partnering to convert the Charter Street power plant from coal into a biomass-driven system. I'm not going to talk any more about that tonight, but that's a clear opportunity. 

If you go out into the farming community, there are a lot of very progressive farmers in the state of Wisconsin who are generating a fair amount of heat and electricity on their own farms from the methane that's generated from agricultural waste. That's another biofuel. Again, the city of Madison generates about 40% of its own electricity to run its wastewater treatment plants by capturing the methane and using that to drive turbines, so that's a biofuel. Then what I'm going to talk about mostly, because it's what we're working on in the center, are cellulosic biofuels, which we see as a potentially sustainable biofuel of tomorrow. Hopefully I've illustrated that there's a variety of these, and some of them are old technologies. It was prehistoric people who first started realizing they could burn wood and generate heat for themselves. Some of them are thought of as today's technologies. With this slide, I want to illustrate to you that biofuels for the liquid transportation sector are really not a new idea. Here's an article from the New York Times in 1925 where a somewhat radical young entrepreneur by the name of Henry Ford, when he was trying to make automobiles available to the average American, realized that there was going to be a need to power those vehicles. He said, we need a cheap source of fuel if I want to put a Model A in everyone's hands, right? And Henry says, "The fuel of the future is going to come from the fruit that sits out by the road, from apples, wood, sawdust, almost anything." So Henry was predicting that we could turn biomass into ethanol and he wanted to run the Model A on ethanol, if you go back and do a history lesson. 

In fact, Henry's vision took a turn because not too long after this, people started discovering cheap oil in Pennsylvania and in the southern part of the United States, and it was so cheap and so easy that no one bothered figuring out whether we could make cars run on ethanol in the 1920s, okay? But there were cars running on ethanol in the 1930s. Here's a photo I stole off the web, I don't know where it came from, but it's the oldest photo I've been able to find of a gentleman in Lincoln, Nebraska putting 10% corn alcohol blend gasoline in his car. He is running his car on exactly what you're running your car on today if you drive up to a gas station. So putting ethanol in our gas tank is not something really new. They were doing it in Lincoln, Nebraska in the early '30s. The scale at which we're doing it today is a little different than what was going on in the '30s. Where did this gasoline come from? Depending on where you live, the ethanol that goes into your gas tank comes from one of these two processes. If you live in the United States, most of this ethanol comes from corn kernels. What people do is, they have industrialized a process where they take the kernels, they get the starch out of it, they break the starch down with heat and enzymes into its component sugars, glucose, and then they ferment that sugar into ethanol. If you live in Brazil, you get to skip a step, because you can grow a lot of sugar cane and that sugar cane is basically a reservoir of glucose. 

You don't have to convert to starch and then glucose, you can just ferment it. This is why Brazil has a very cheap and easy source of glucose, and why they're running their cars on 85% ethanol, E-85, and we're running our cars on 10% ethanol, because we are having legitimate problems supplying enough ethanol in the United States to keep cars running on 10% ethanol without taking food off the animals' feed plate or without taking food off of my plate or making me pay even more for a dozen ears of corn when I go to the farmers market. This is today's technology. This is the same technology that gave that gentleman ethanol in 1933. We know how to do this really well. This is not what we're doing in Great Lakes Bioenergy. We are not working on this at all. This is taking food and converting it into fuel. We're working on non-food based technology, so-called cellulosic biofuels. Cellulose is the non-edible part of the plant. 

Again, going back to the corn plant, it would be the cob or the stalk, what the farmers call the stover. It would be wood chips that are left over from the paper industry. It would be the remains of plant material that is in excess in the United States today, that we are trying to develop the technology to turn into fuels. There is a large amount of it. In the United States every year from existing agricultural and forestry activity, we generate over 1.3 billion tons of cellulose every year. That is not part of the energy grid. Notice I didn't say it doesn't have a use. We're trying to figure out how much of it is useable and important for the ecosystem, but it's not used to be part of the energy grid. That's what the federal government was looking at as a potential resource to provide the fuels in this green area. That's the cellulosic biofuels, or the cellulosic ethanol piece. 

There's a technological problem with converting cellulose into ethanol or other fuels. I'll illustrate that problem as a homeowner. When you go home tonight and you're wearing a cotton shirt and you put it in the washing machine, it doesn't dissolve. The cotton shirt is made out of cellulose fibers from a cotton plant. Mother Nature has evolved cellulose so that it is a water insoluble, recalcitrant molecule that is resistant. It's water insoluble. It doesn't go in the water even if you have a white shirt and you wash it at high temperature. It doesn't dissolve even if you put bleach in the white shirt in the washing machine. So it has been engineered by Mother Nature to be resistant to going in solution. If I want to take something apart, I want to take that polymer apart and make it into its component sugars, just like we did with starch, I have to dissolve it. 

I have to get it into solution in order to even begin to discuss how I'm going to convert it into fuel. It's the technology behind this need to convert the cellulosic plant biomass into fuels that led to one of the reports that was discussed in my introduction, published jointly by the Department of Energy and the USDA, calling for a research roadmap to convert cellulosic biomass into biofuels. This report said, if we could capture a billion tons of that plant biomass and convert it into liquid transportation fuels every year, we could reduce transportation sector fossil fuel use by 30%. And the authors, I was on that committee, I was going to say "we gave ourselves," the authors of that report gave the federal government till 2030 to realize their challenge, so about 25 years from when this report was published. The challenge, then, is, if we can take the cellulose and make it into these types of fuels, ethanol or so-called next generation or advanced biofuels, which are basically hydrocarbons or oils that have properties that might be better to burn in your automobile than ethanol, or that have properties that will have to be burned in a diesel or in a jet engine, because you're never going to burn ethanol in those types of engines. Then we can leave fossil fuel in the ground. So let me illustrate to you why this is such a problem in a little bit more of a scientific way and why the federal government went after this problem as the source for where we could generate fuels. Everyone has their favorite source of fuels. We should be recycling all the oil out of French fry fryers, we should be doing --. This is a large-scale problem if we're going to generate 16 billion gallons of fuel additives every year. 

No matter how many fast food restaurants there are, you're not going to get it by recycling all of the French fry oil, okay? Now let me illustrate the pros and cons for why the government chose cellulose. The opportunities, or the pros, were, as I've already said, this is the non-edible part of the plant. There is a lot of legitimate concern about starch-based biofuels because we are entering this food versus fuel debate. By using the part of the plant that we do not eat, we are potentially generating fuel from the materials that are not part of the human or animal food chain. Another plus is, there's a lot of it. Cellulose is actually the most abundant organic material on the earth. If you look around and look at every blade of grass and every tree and every plant, you'll realize there's a lot of it. There's a feed stock for us to capture and convert into fuel. It's largely sugar polymers, and most of the sugar, not all of it, depending on the plant, is glucose, the same thing that we get out of cornstarch. If we can unlock the glucose and get it in the solution, then we can convert it into ethanol or other fuels, next generation fuels, either by chemical or microbial processes that are well entrenched in the industry. 

Anyone can do this. I make beer at home. You can make ethanol, right?  Those are all of the reasons why cellulose was picked. There's a lot of it. It's components are easy to ferment and convert into fuels once we get them. The challenges are, and I've already illustrated it with the cotton shirt analogy, is these glucose units, these yellow rings that we want to get at, are linked together in fibers, and these fibers are insoluble. These yellow fibers are protected by blue fibers that's a different kind of cellulose called hemicellulose that wrap around them. Before I can get into the yellow stuff, I've got to dissolve the blue stuff, too. Once I get into the yellow stuff, I've got to dissolve the yellow stuff. Before I even get into the blue stuff, there's something holding this spider's web together called lignin. 

Lignin is an aromatic polymer, so for those of you who aren't chemists, when you use mouthwash, it's an aromatic compound. It's a phenol. So there's an aromatic polymer holding this spider's web together. If I start breaking that down and releasing aromatics, phenols, it's going to have the same effect on the microbes that I want to do the fermentation, as you gargling with mouthwash will have. It'll be antibacterial. So it'll kill the fermentation. We have to figure out how we can tease out the lignin away from the sweet stuff, the sugars, and then take the sugars apart and get them to dissolve and make them into fuels. So we have a large number of challenges here. The other challenge is that not all plant cellulose is the same. The relative amount of yellow stuff and blue stuff and red stuff, and the different types of chemicals in the red, yellow and blue stuff, is very different if I'm looking at a corn plant or if I'm looking at a grass, like a prairie grass or switchgrass, you may have heard of that. 

Or if I'm looking at woods. It's even different in woods if I'm looking at a hardwood or a softwood. Although there are general issues that we need to attack, there are also going to be plant-specific issues that need to be considered because it's possible that not any single technology is going to be home-run for all plants. That's critical if you think about it, even if you just think about it locally. You live in a state that has a large agricultural base. Look at what the differences are in the state of Wisconsin. If you go up to the northern part of the state, it's mostly forestry. There's going to be a lot of wood going into this pipeline if we're successful. If you look around here, it's mostly corn stover. If you go to the middle part of the state where it's not forestry and not good enough to grow corn, it's a lot of native prairie. 

Even in the state of Wisconsin, we might need to have three different technologies to get the sugars out of the different cropping systems that this state is likely to want to use to generate fuels. Magnify that across 50 states in the United States, magnify it across all the plants around the world, and you'll see the scope of this problem grows very, very rapidly. If we're successful, this is what tomorrow's technology will look like. We'll be able to take cellulosic biomass and somehow grind it up or prepare it, whether it's sawdust, or if we take cornstalks and grind it up, we can then pre-treat it with some chemicals and heat to get these polymers out and exposed. Then we can come in with enzymes, molecular scissors, and cut those yellow chains into individual units so that they can be converted by microbes or chemistry into ethanol and next generation fuels. Some of the other tricks here are going to be, that unlike this industrial process, where all the sugar is one, it's glucose, these are going to be mixtures of sugars. As wonderful as microbes are, I'm a microbiologist, they tend to act like my teenage son at a smorgasbord. If I give my son a smorgasbord table and offer him broccoli and meat and chocolate cake, he's going to go after the chocolate cake first. So microbes are the same. They're going to go after some of these sugars first, and then only eat the other ones after they're done with the glucose. 

If you're running an industrial process, you don't want that to happen, because that means this one's going to go and then that one and that one, you've got wait a long time. What you want is an industrial process that's more like an omnivore, where my son would go up and take some broccoli and take his meat and his dessert and eat it all at once. We need to come up with fermentation and conversion processes that will accept a mixed stream of sugars, all at once, and make fuels out of it. That's a challenge for us also. Again, to illustrate, up here this shows a variety of the plant or biomass ecosystems that we are evaluating for moving into this industrial chain. Anything from corn stover up to native prairie grasses. They can be cleared every year. They come and they clear the prairie outside my house, they burn it. Every year. They let it come back. 

Why not take that cellulose and convert it into fuel, or take a fraction of it and convert it into fuel. If you look across the spectrum, there's plants that are so-called high maintenance, high input, corn, which requires a lot of fertilizer. Fertilizer has greenhouse gas and water quality effects that are potential negatives. And yet a low diversity. It's got the same corn in there every year and it challenges the land. Two, systems that have high diversity. Let Mother Nature grow prairies. And no input, no fertilizer, no added water, no formal irrigation or farming systems. Potentially much better from a greenhouse gas and carbon footprint than things down here. Then there are systems across the spectrum that are intermediate in terms of diversity and energy or fertilizer input, that are all being evaluated because, again, as we diversify the energy grid, we'd like to diversify the biomass that goes into it. 

We'd like to respect the fact that a farmer in Nebraska might have agricultural practices that are different than a farmer in Dane County in Wisconsin, and we'd like to generate technology that helps as many people as possible to be contributors to this grid. In principle, this is what this technology could look like. A farmer or a co-op could take in biomass, corn stover or woodchips, and shred it, have it aggregated, pre-treated with heat and chemicals to make a liquid, a liquor or an extract. That liquor and extract would then be treated to break those chains of polymers down from this insoluble form into soluble little bits, which could then be fed to chemists, or the microbes, and make your fuel, and out comes the fuel and it goes either in a pipeline or into some trucking system. This is an idealized cartoon. It shows somebody's vision. This technology really does not exist today. It is not clear whether this activity is all going to go on in one place or whether it's going to be delocalized. In this cartoon, it gives you the sense that we've already decided all of this biomass is going to be shipped from the northern peninsula of Michigan, or the upper part of Lake Superior in Wisconsin down to a centralized plant in Peoria, Illinois, where all of this is going to happen in one place. There's a variety of reasons why that doesn't make sense and we can talk about them later, in terms of shipping costs, in terms of energy negatives to ship it, etc. 

It's also formally possible that these different processes would occur at different places. The farmer may take his biomass or her biomass and have it processed at a co-op. A co-op would make the liquor and maybe the liquor would be refined into a fuel on site, but maybe it doesn't make sense to have every co-op also have a fermentation refinery. Maybe the co-op takes the liquor and ships it to a more centralized refinery. Maybe there's 100 co-ops in Wisconsin, maybe there's six refineries in Wisconsin that take the stuff in and convert and generate the fuels. This cartoon shows the fuels coming out as ethanol. They could be ethanol, we know how to make ethanol really well today. There's a variety of people who have legitimate concerns that ethanol isn't the best thing to be putting in the gas tank, or one of the other senate directors says, there are better things to do with ethanol than put it in my gas tank and you probably know what he's talking about. We are working very hard at generating both ethanol from cellulose, but also generating so-called next generation fuels. Things that are more similar to the fuels that the dinosaurs give us from fossil fuels that are more readily acceptable in engines, either engines of today or engines of tomorrow that we would like to help have a conversation with the automakers and the engine institute people on campus about what we can make so that ten years from now we're working on things that make sense. 

It's not clear that out of this will come ethanol. It's also not clear that out of this will come ethanol that goes into trucks. These refineries could be sited at a place where an oil company or a distribution company wants to build a pipeline, because there's so much stuff coming in it can be piped, okay? The key point here is, the success of this industry or this technology will depend on which cellulosic biofuels are produced, where we produce them, and how we make them. Those are all things that we're working on in the center. How did the center come to be? The center came to be because when DOE wrote this report, one of the things they realized is, there was a huge technology gap between what they wanted to do and what it could do. The executive summary called for the establishment for so-called bioenergy research centers, which were charged to develop the breakthroughs that would connect those two areas. The call for those centers was issued in about August of 2006. The applications were submitted in February of 2007, so in six months there were a large number of people all over the United States, including a bunch down the street, pulling together partnerships to write proposals. They were reviewed, the winners were announced in July of 2007, and the first check arrived in September. I'm here telling you about this today because obviously we won one of those awards. 

We were one of three bioenergy research centers established by the US Department of Energy in fall of 2007. When we were funded, we anticipated getting $125 million over five years. We actually now anticipate getting $142 million. A large amount of the difference between what we were supposed to get and what we anticipate getting falls into two flavors. One is, we were given 18 months to get the center up and running. We had to buy a lot of equipment, we had to renovate space on campus. The DOE, when we were funded, said, 18 months is too long. Within two or three months after we were funded, the price of gasoline was almost $4 a gallon, so they gave us a bunch of money. They gave us $10 million up front that we thought we were going to spend in year two on equipment to buy equipment in year one. So we had a $10 million supplement right off the bat. 

This year we've brought in about $8 million in stimulus money or ARRA money to roll out new technology that we could deploy now that we couldn't even think about deploying when we wrote the grant. So that's why we're up to about $142 million. It is actually the largest single grant UW-Madison has ever captured, so we're damn proud of it, for lack of any other word. We're actually a consortium. UW-Madison is the home institution. There are seven academic partners, mostly in the Midwest. Michigan State University is in green because between UW-Madison and Michigan State, we spend about 90% to 95% of the research budget. So about 60% of it here and about a third of it at East Lansing. We have two national lab partners that provide expertise to us. There's two companies in Middleton, just west of the Beltline in the research park, that have specific roles in the center, helping us screen for microbes and catalysts that do a better job. 

We're funded by the DOE. These are some of our partners in the DOE. We have had strong support from the states of Wisconsin and Michigan because they saw this was a good idea and I cannot stress how critical that support has been and how grateful we are for that support, especially in what are very tough economic times for these two states. In the state of Wisconsin, the governor promised us a new building and I'll tell you in a minute where that's going. The money for that was in the budget in July of 2009. The governor promised us the ability to hire new faculty in this area because he sees it, renewable energy and renewable bioenergy, he sees it as a growth industry. Despite how tough the budget was this year, there's a line item in there that honors his commitment to do that. Similar things happened over in the state of Michigan, as well. As we're successful, we are going to generate technology that, without being egotistical, we view as being groundbreaking. As groundbreaking as some of the other things that have gone on on the UW-Madison campus. 

Something that gets the press a lot is things like stem cells, or computer chips. We view what we're doing as being as groundbreaking potentially as what's gone on in those two areas. As we generate those technologies, we bring them to the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, WARF, the university's patent arm and tech transfer arm. They have put together a team of representatives from all of these institutions who have already agreed on how we're going to handle technology and how they're going to bring it out to the private sector. DOE made it clear, and we were happy they made it clear, that they did not want groundbreaking technology sitting in the academic labs or sitting in some patent office filing cabinet. They wanted it out to the marketplace as aggressively as possible. We won the grant based on science. We had a strong support package from the state, but we also knew we had a strong support in the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, given the history of technology transfer that they do. They are second behind University of California system. Not a University of California campus, but the whole state. 

That's how good they are. This is where we were the day after we were funded. We were funded on September 28, 2007. We got the $10 million award that day, and it just so happened we were playing Michigan State the following Saturday and they brought a bunch of us out on the field right before halftime to honor us. We won the game, so that was good. (laughter) This actually shows, with the exception of Chancellor Wiley and Molly Jahn and the two mascots, there's four faculty members here. This shows about half of Great Lakes Bioenergy on that day. We had nobody. We had nine faculty members from these two campuses who were on a management team who now were in receipt of $10 million and we knew there was $25 million more coming on October 1st, the first day of the next federal year, and we had to staff this thing up. Let me now fast-forward and tell you where we are almost two and a half years later. 

We have almost 400 employees across the entire center, going from nobody to 400. We've brought in millions of dollars of equipment to help us do research. We have been humbled at the kinds of people who have wanted to come here and give up really good jobs to work in this center because they see the opportunity, and because they're passionate about what we're doing. The activity of these 400 people across these centers really takes advantage of a large amount of shared strategic vision. Even though we have people in academics, in national labs, and companies, they come at science with different perspective and different types of creativity. They've all bought in, they're working together as a team and making this center greater than the sum of all of its parts. We have biological, physical, and computational scientists. We have a very interdisciplinary group. I should also put social scientists up here. We have economists in the center, as well. 

We have a large group of people that are working on the problem, both in traditional wet laboratories and dry laboratories. I'll say, an economist or a computer scientist working at a workstation is a dry lab. We have a large amount of field work to evaluate different cropping systems and how this is going to affect agricultural activity. We've rolled out a lot of specialized, high-throughput core facilities to process a lot of samples in the way that your pharmaceutical company would, so that we can analyze more materials and more samples per unit of time than we would if we were doing things the way we typically do things in academics with another graduate student or another postdoc. Now we have graduate students and undergraduate students and postdocs being exposed to modern high-throughput activities. Every one of the people in this center, regardless of where they come from, have bought into the mission and the idea of collaborating. This strategy allows us to invest in our strengths at UW-Madison and to collaborate with people at MSU or at Iowa State or at other places to solve the problem instead of having to create things locally. The strategy also allows us to collaborate with each of the other two bioenergy centers, and something called the DOE Joint Genome Institute, as open partners where we can share technology as it comes out of the lab notebook and see if something that I've developed here will help him in his center, and if we hit a home run then we bring it to the patent lawyers and they'll figure out how to disperse that technology later on. We are not secretive about things. We're trying to get advances made and move things out to the private sector as rapidly as we can. 

What are we doing in the center? If you look at our research programs, they would basically break down into four sets of knowledge generating activities. We're trying to understand more about plant biology and the assembly of those cellulose fibers in the plant cell wall so that we can improve plants for their use in cellulose biofuels feed stocks. We're trying to generate knowledge to create low-cost sugar streams from this cellulose by improving pretreatment and enzymes. Less harsh, higher temperature. Lower temperature, less caustic pretreatments and cheaper enzymes. We're trying to generate knowledge to figure out how we can convert the sugar streams into either ethanol, because we know how to run cars on ethanol today, or into next generation biofuels that would be out there in 2030 and beyond, hydrocarbons, etc. We're trying to generate the knowledge to deploy what we call economically and environmentally sustainable biofuel cropping systems. We want, as we generate this technology, we want to make sure that whatever science we have in these three parts does not detract from the environmental sustainability of the land or the overall economics of how this process is going to work. Of the three centers, we are the only center, we are unique in having a sustainability program to evaluate the economics and environmental impacts of these technologies before they are even developed. We already have two years' worth of field data that we're beginning to analyze. 

If you look at the center and you view the upper right quadrant of this as a goal, as a place where we want to be, because our mission from the DOE is to develop cost-efficient, commercially viable processes for sustainable, large-scale conversion of cellulosic biomass into fuel, we're going to fuel, no pun intended, a whole new industry. A lot of our activities are down here at the fringes where we're trying to understand the fundamental biology and economics of these processes, and as we get breakthroughs, we move those into applications and then those are being moved into coupled systems. So we have a lot of programs out here. We have some programs in here already after two years where we've decided how we want to think about breeding plants to be better, how to think about better energy crops, and how to generate microbes that do a better job of making fuels. We're constantly moving technology from here to here with the idea, in the DOE report, it says that it's likely to take 15 to 20 years to get everything up here where it needs to be. That's why we're also optimistic and beginning the work on what we could do in the center in the next five years, assuming that the Department of Energy puts out a call to renew these for five more years in 2012. It may seem like we have grandiose plans. But let me just illustrate one thing to kind of maybe say that we're not a bunch of crazy academics. I'm going to illustrate that by comparing what you buy when you buy an ear of corn today, maize, at the market, with what corn was like 100 years ago when breeders started to study it and found it in Central and South America, teosinte. Society has done an amazing job converting the grain in teosinte into the grain that we get in corn when we buy it at the market today. 

This breeding program, if you now look at the genetic basis of this, there's only five genetic changes that have occurred between here and here. If we can do that with corn, without genomic blueprints and without a lot of genetics at the turn of the last century, I think we're not crazy to think that with the type of horsepower we can apply to this problem, we can breed plants to be better cellulosic biofuel feed stocks in the future because we can see what's going on and we can breed for traits much better than we could when this type of breeding was going on. Let me just quickly walk you through some of the things that are going on in the center. You've seen this slide before, or this part of the slide, where we're looking at a variety of different cropping systems. It turns out, in our center, most of what we're working on is corn because it's genetically manipulable and we have a lot of local expertise. We have some amount of activity in grasses and prairie. What we're trying to do in corn and grasses is improve the traits of those plants for their use as cellulosic biofuel feed stocks. To say that another way, we're trying to go in and modify the cell wall so that I can unravel that red, blue and yellow stuff easier and get a sugar strain that I can convert into fuels. We have other activities in the center that are looking to figure out how to improve the deconstruction of that plant material into a sugar strain. Some of those activities are already based on what we know we can do to cellulose, maybe in things like corn stover. 

But others of those activities are based on an assumption that a large amount of the feed stock going into this pipeline is going to be existing plants. If I look across these different types of plants, we can probably go in and breed for traits in corn and get society to accept a seed company selling seed to a farmer where the farmer can get both grain and cellulose every year when he or she plants. I do not think we're going to be in a place where I can breed native prairies to have traits and expect those prairies to come back every year with the traits that we might sprinkle out on the seed. Mother Nature is going to win that battle every time, and Mother Nature should win that battle every time because that's what makes the ecosystem healthy. Feeding into this pipeline are going to be a large number of existing plant biomass, either from species we can't breed or from ones we don't want to breed, okay? We have activities that are trying to optimize chemical and microbial conversion of the sugar stream into ethanol and next generation fuels. And we have a large program to look at the sustainability of each of these activities and get the science so that we can inform agricultural, economic, environmental, and policy issues. We do not want to generate cool technology here, here, or here and have it be non-sustainable. We do not want to generate plants, take all the cellulose off the field, and not return enough nutrients to the field so that we have a dust bowl in ten years. We are looking at those issues already today to see how much cellulose we can take off the field before anyone begins a large-scale practice to take that cellulose off the field. If any of these things work, but they don't work as an integrated system, we're going to be in worse shape in the future than we are today. 

That's what the sustainability program does for us, is it's a checks-and-balances system to look at all of our activity and make sure it'll work as a whole. If I have cool technology in the micro area and it doesn't fit, we might throw it out until we can figure out how to make an economic and environmentally sustainable piece work together. If you look at the sustainability program, again looking at all of these different cropping systems, we're worried about what it's going to take for people to accept this. Those people are both the farmers as well as the average citizen. We want to know what the energy going in is and what the plant and microbial outputs are from these types of agricultural systems. Again, we don't want to change the microbial community of the soil so that soil is no longer a good receptacle to grow plants, because we will have created a larger problem than the one that we're facing today. We're looking at the geochemistry of what would happen if all of a sudden we took marginal lands that are currently used for corn and converted them into prairies. We'd like to know what the water quality issues are. We'd like to know what the soil issues are, what the carbon footprints are, and what the greenhouse gas effects are. Everyone says, this is going to be wonderful. 

I say, we don't have the data yet. I think they're right, but we're generating the data to figure out how positive each of these are going to be. We're looking at biodiversity. We're looking at what happens to squirrels and birds and animal pests and insect pests as we begin to look at different types of cropping systems. We don't want to develop a technology based on a cropping system and either destroy an existing animal habitat or create a new habitat for a terrible agricultural pest that all of a sudden creates a problem we didn't anticipate. Again, we have two years' worth of field data already, from Kellogg Biological Station in Michigan and Arlington Farms in Wisconsin. We're looking at all of these issues on all of these different cropping systems at different scales. We have economists and life cycle modelists in the center as well, trying to predict, if we're going to use different crops, where would you need to place these co-ops that are going to make the liquors, and where would you need to place the refineries that are going to make the fuels based on geography, based on what the feed stocks are that are coming in. We have people looking at satellite data to try and figure out how much useable land there is and how much cellulose we could really get if we wanted to shift land from one practice to another and looked at the entire system as a whole. What have we been doing in the last two years? Well, as I said, we've been doing basic research, that's what we do down here in the blue part of this curve, and as a function of time, we've brought a lot of things out from the center that, if you're an academic, are in a bunch of papers as of the first of the year. 

It was over 70. We've brought to our technology transfer working group almost two dozen patent disclosures that are working their way through the patent pipeline on new technologies, new enzymes, new microbes, new lines of plants that have modified cell walls or new ways to create plants that have modified cell walls. WARF says there's strong interest in several technologies to make a start-up company, so I guess we're successful on at least one technology. There's a large amount of licensing conversations going on for others. We are always going to work down here in the blue part of the space. We are never going to be up here in the industry where we're building a refinery and making ethanol down the street by Camp Randall Stadium. That's the technology we're bringing out to the sector. We are not going to be selling corn seeds. We'll let the seed companies do that. Now, if we generate something and it's not perfect, a company can come back to us, who lives in the green space, and say, we'd like you to modify what you've made and put it into our system and they can do that with sponsored research and technology transfer in the way that we always do things. 

How do we know what the industry wants? We have an advisory board that includes leaders from the biofuels industry, from the automotive industry, from the chemical industry. There's a lot of interest in our technology because in addition to making fuels, we can make chemicals that currently come from fossil fuels. Biocommodities instead of biofuels. If we can do that, we can leave another barrel of fuel in the ground. There's a fair amount of interest from the fermentation industry. We had the head brewmeister from Miller worldwide on our advisory board. We did that because it's local and they do a lot of fermentation. Making ethanol is a fermentation and they're pretty darn good at it. But they're interested in doing this because they have a lot of organic waste that they have to clean up and spend a lot of money to clean up before they ship it to the city of Milwaukee and then pay a tariff at Milwaukee to clean it up even further. And if they can use our technologies to take that organic waste stream, which is not that different from the liquor or the extract we're going to get from plants, and convert it into a second high-value product, they may get more units from that per pint than they get from a pint of beer. 

They're very interested in developing new technologies by seeing what we're doing. We have representatives from the venture capital area to keep us in the loop on what's going on out in the private sector. We're also partners on several pilot cellulosic bio refinery plants that have been funded by another wing of DOE called the EERE, Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy wing. This is more of their SPIR, their applied wing, where they're already putting $50 or $100 million out to groups to generate pilot or demonstration cellulosic biofuel plants that will generate, like, 1,000 gallons of ethanol a day or 10,000 gallons a day. Remember my earlier slide that said 16 billion gallons a year? This is small-scale technology. We can make cellulosic ethanol today in one of those plants. Not we, but they can, at $4 a gallon. You don't want to put that ethanol in your car because it's too expensive. We need to increase the efficiency of this, lower the cost, and then figure out from these plants how it would scale in order for this to be a technology. That's going to be the real fun part up here is to scale this up so that it can provide the 16 billion gallons of fuel. 

I -- our job and generate the technology. I can see that. To scale up is going to be a whole other issue. The other thing that we're doing that we're very proud of is, we have a large education and outreach program that's informing society about sustainable biofuels. As a center, it has 90% of its budget in two land-grant universities. We have a strong commitment to educating students about the career opportunities associated with this technology. We like to think that we're training tomorrow's leaders as we create the technology. We do a lot of work on media. This is Larry Meiller, if you ever listen to Larry, we're on Larry Meiller's call-in show about once every quarter. We have summer institutes for students from other institutions come in on campus or at Michigan State. 

We've worked with campus groups. We have K-12 teachers come in every summer. One of them sits in my lab and does experiments in the center and spends a day a week down in the instructional labs thinking about what modules he or she could bring back for middle school students or high school students. We're trying to get this technology as opportunities out to people in the sector. In closing, I just want to take a couple of minutes to say a few words about how this changing energy sector can impact Wisconsin and the region. I've spent a lot of time talking about next generation fuels and we're actively involved with people on campus in the engine institute to see what they're thinking about for fuels and what we're thinking about for fuel additives and how we can work together, even though we're not funded to do that. We have a large interest in thinking about how we can make biocommodities so that we can make agricultural waste for farmers more valuable to them than it is today. If we're successful, I think this is going to create jobs, technologies and supporting industries for people all over the state. If we're successful, it's going to be local, in small towns in the northern part of the state as well as in big cities. It's going to be diversified. 

There's going to be new ways for people to get their energy. A lot of what we're working on, I can sit down with a piece of paper and say, you could use a compost heap in your garden to generate electricity to power a battery in your basement from the same kind of microbial activities that we're working on in the center. Again, it's not what we're funded to do. We have a large amount of activities to inform people and stakeholders of what's going on. We're trying to set up activities to inform environmental, economic, societal, and policy decisions. There's a huge economic opportunity here. The Department of Energy itself estimates that cellulosic biofuels technology will generate a million jobs in ten to twenty years. To put that in perspective, the fossil fuel industry is reported to have about 10 million jobs across the United States. So it's a tenth of what the entire fossil fuel industry can make. Only about 10,000 of those million jobs will be PhDs like myself. 

The large fraction of them will likely be blue collar workers working in refineries, farmers, people with bachelor's degrees. I think there's a large sector that can also benefit from this for career opportunities. In closing, I want to thank you for your attention and leave time for questions. We're really excited about doing this. It's exciting science. Personally, I know myself and a lot of other people in the center are also very excited about this because the activities in the center resonate very well with something called the Wisconsin Idea, which is something that we think very strongly about on the Madison campus. We're state employees, we're there to educate students, but we're also there to generate technology that benefits the taxpayers of the state. We see renewable biofuels and renewable energy as a big piece of what the Wisconsin Idea can do in the next couple of decades. Thank you for your time. (applause)  >> Lewis: Well, thank you so much in sharing your gratitude as I do for Tim Donohue for all he has done to bring research dollars and new ideas and new employees and new jobs here to Wisconsin. 

He is very open at this point to answer any questions. What I wanted to remind you is, because this is being taped this evening and can be heard again and will be available on DVD, please use the microphone. Ronnie Hess here, director of our Academy Evenings program, will make sure you have it so the question can also be taped with the answer. Tim, how about...? >> Donohue: Take it away. >> Lewis: Starting here with the first question. Thank you. >> Hi. I've been burning a biofuel for four years ever since I bought a new Volkswagen Jetta diesel in 2006 and I'm strongly interested in the future of bio--, which you didn't delve into too much here. One problem that any biodiesel user can tell anybody else about is that the stuff tends to cloud as it gets colder and so -- up. The only way around that is to preheat the fuel --. 

I understand there's a factory in Germany that's working on... (inaudible)  ...sort of a mid-product that improves an -- fuel, either mimicking gasoline or jet aircraft fuel or diesel. Are you working on something in line with the same? >> Donohue: We are. We have a lot of activity in generating cellulosic ethanol. We have a lot of activity in generating hydrocarbons, which are biodiesel. To be optimistic, the beauty of what we're trying to do is that we can try to predict what the cloud point, we can use chemical principles and know what the cloud point would be of these biodiesel additives. A lot of the biodiesel that's currently made, you don't have the ability to predict those things and so in principle if we're successful, we can make materials that will have less need for those types of technology than what we're currently using today. That is not an insignificant challenge, but it's a significant part of our mandate, because if you look at liquid transportation fuel, you may think that it's all about traditional combustion engines that run on 10% ethanol. If you look at jet plane and long-haul fuel uses, it's about 2/3 of the liquid transportation grid. Europe has gone over. 

Certain countries made a decision 20 years ago to go to diesel. The United States did not make that decision. Will they make it in the future? Is anybody's guess. But for that reason and for the other reasons we're looking at other next generation fuels that will hopefully not have the issues that you're mentioning. >> Tim, you mentioned a building. >> Yeah. >> Would you like to go beyond that? >> I ran out of time. We are about a third of the way into design of a new Wisconsin Energy Institute building on the UW-Madison campus. It will live right here at the intersection of Breese Terrace and Old University and University Avenue, right across the street from the church and looking right at WID. Its placement here represents the fact that this is, if you will, a nexus for all of the activities that are going on in the renewable energy and biofuels area on campus, so that's where it will live. 

We're going to dig a hole in that site, not we, but the contractors, somewhere around summer of this year and we hope to move in by the end of 2012. That's the site of the old student health services building. Ultimately, we would also take the Naval ROTC building down as well. Yes? >> Tim, great presentation. I hear you talking primarily about terrestrial plants, it sounded like. I was wondering, here we are in the Great Lakes region and Wisconsin, Minnesota, we've got lots of lakes. We've got lots of shallow lakes and I live right next to a shallow lake that has tons of weeds that are just a nuisance. I'm wondering, with all the unintended consequences of fertilizing our lakes already, is there a win-win option to look at aquatic plants as well? >> There are options. I'm not an aquatic botanist to know enough about what the cellulose content of those plants would be. I don't know what the aggregate tonnage of cellulose from aquatic plants would be if we stacked it up against the 1.5 billion tons of cellulosic biomass that we have now. 

But as we generate this technology, although you may need to design a technology for aquatic cellulose, it should apply to just about any cellulosic feed stock that we give it. There is a potential to take plant, weed material off of aquatic ecosystems. How much of that 16 billion tons of fuel we'll get out of that, I wouldn't know because I don't really know what the aggregate tonnage is around the US for aquatic cellulosic biomass. Those DOE and USDA numbers are clearly driven by more traditional land-based cellulose. >> I believe your research emphasis on the sustainability, but I'm wondering if you have a crystal ball to see whether policy makers are going to wait for the research that you're doing on sustainability or whether there's going to be such pressure to get the technologies out there that you won't actually have the opportunity to assess the sustainability of some of those processes. >> Well, I was actually in Washington last week briefing. We were invited, the three bioenergy center directors, were invited to go in and brief the staff for the House committee that funds the Department of Energy. There's clearly pressure, that they're excited that we're getting stuff done and want to know how fast we can get it out, but I can tell you to a person, they are ecstatic to hear that we're going to have science, some amount of science, to help them generate policy by. (laughter) It's just following in a long-standing tradition, right? (laughter) So I think they're very excited to hear that we're generating this type of science on fieldwork and carbon footprints to inform what it will mean for agricultural and environmental policy. What it could mean for price supports. 

What it could mean for you as a farmer if you're getting 300 bushel an acre corn on marginal land and you want to convert it into grasses. It might take you five years to have the fertilizer drained and have that land be a good host for grasses. So what are you going to do when you're faced with making that decision? Are you going to let 100 acres go out of production and lose all that income, or does there need to be price supports to help incentivize your transition from one type of cropping system over to another. Those are the types of issues we're trying to give them data on. Yes? >> You use the term "next generation fuels." Can you be more specific? >> We in our center are looking at fatty acid methyl esters, hydrocarbons. Other people are looking at isoprenoids, which have very good flash points and could go in the jet fuels today. We're looking at various types of long-chain hydrocarbon molecules that are not dissimilar from what we get out of the ground in fossil fuels. They're simpler, we can control their chemical properties because we're making them in controlled biological or chemical systems, but they are not dissimilar from what we get out of the ground today.  >> Does your research include studies of the animals that are known to digest cellulose? Termites come to mind. I've also heard on the BBC News - >> Yeah, so, we have a large program in the deconstruction area where we're trying to learn from ecosystems that live on cellulose about microbes and enzymes that have evolved over millions of years to enforce that lifestyle. 

We have some work in looking at the microbes in cow rumens. That's a very Wisconsin thing to be looking at. We also have some work in beetles, looking at the microbes that live in beetles. We have a large and unique program on campus in looking at leaf cutter ants that inhabit the tropics and can deforest hundreds of acres of trees very rapidly. That is an ecosystem that has evolved over million of years and actually does, and I hate to say it, much better at degrading cellulose than a cow does, because they don't put out the other stuff that is running the methane digester on the cow farm, right? We've identified a lot of microbes in those ecosystems that grow very well on pre-treated cellulose, and we're learning from that and trying to apply that to make this process more efficient. Yes? >> So cellulosic technologies are kind of a response to the food versus fuel issue? It seems like if you deconstruct the biomass you can essentially generate more food, you can generate sugars which can be put into food chains. >> Yes. So you could sell the glucose that we generate and use it, and compete with the price of glucose, for example. But we think that would have a huge economic and energy negative. So today, if you wanted to make glucose and sell it, you'll get it from starch. 

The starch is a pure polymer of glucose, it doesn't have all the other stuff in it. It's less energy-intensive and therefore less economically costly to get that glucose and sell it on the market. The stuff that we're going to get out of cellulose is really going to be a mixed liquor. If you have to go in and purify that glucose, it's going to cost you a lot of energy and a lot of time, and your profit margin on a molecule of glucose is going to be very, very low compared to glucose from starch. If we can take that mixed stuff that's low cost and ferment it all at once, you're going to have a much better profit margin by selling the fuel than you would by selling the glucose. That's the thinking.  >> I'm just wondering if you could tell us a bit about the emissions from the cellulosic fuels in comparison to emissions from petroleum-based fuels. >> Ethanol coming from cellulose will be ethanol coming from starch, so the emissions will be the same, okay? We started putting ethanol in cars for two reasons. When I was a kid, we started doing it in the '70s after the so-called Arab Oil Crisis. How many of you remember that? Not for reasons that we're putting ethanol in cars for today, but to deal with air quality effects in big cities, like LA and San Francisco and New York City, I grew up in New York City. 

It wasn't done in Madison in the '70s, it was done in major metropolitan areas. More recently, we have expanded that for air quality issues as well as to provide another market for cornstarch, for farmers. So this is where policy and science didn't always mix. We want to avoid going down that road again, okay? In terms of the next generation fuels, I'm going to avoid that answer and it's going to sound like I'm being cheap, but I'm going to say I can't tell you because I don't know what those are going to be. There's a large amount of activity and interest in making something called bioglutenol, which is an alcohol like ethanol, it's just longer. Because it's a longer chain, it has slightly better combustion properties. So it's okay. But we're thinking way outside the box. We're thinking way beyond those kinds of simple changes. Until we figure out what the palette of molecules are that we're making, and test them in an engine with people in the engine center, I really can't answer those questions. 

I'm not trying to avoid them, I just don't have an answer. Yeah? >> In Brazil is the biofuel a byproduct or a primary product from the sugar cane? >> It's a primary product. That's why they've converted so many acres of rainforest into sugar cane. >> At what price can they produce a gallon? >> Oh... I don't know that off the top of my head, but it's... I don't know what the average consumer pays for a gallon of gas in Brazil. I'm sorry, I just don't know that one. Yes? >> Can you provide any detail about the start-up company? >> No, because I don't even know who it is. That's WARF's business. Well, so, there have been a couple of things. 

We have technology, we have developed technology on campus that is being driven by Ron Rayns in the biochemistry and chemistry departments. There was just a little write-up on a recent paper he had in the New York Times, I think on the first of March. Where he's able to take ground-up sawdust and convert it into sugars in one step with a chemical, and we can ferment those sugars and make fuel out of them as efficiently as if I grabbed a bottle of glucose off the chemical shelf and fed it to microbes. He's also developed technology with a slightly different chemistry to make precursors, -- that can be easily converted into fuel. How many of you have ever heard of Virent Technologies on the east side? Virent is a start-up company that grew out of technology developed by Jim Dumesic in the chemical and biological engineering department on campus. -- are a common precursor for catalytic reforming in the fuels. We can now take sawdust and make it into --. One possibility is that there are people looking to start a Virent type start-up out of those types of activities. >> Ronnie Hess: We have time for one more question. >> My question is sort of about public outreach a little bit. 

I've been involved in some public opinion research here about biofuels and one of the things that, and I can't expound on this too much yet, but it seems like when people think about biofuels, they think about corn ethanol and that's pretty much it. We even did some different wording of questions and found out that basically even when you call it "biofuels" versus "ethanol" or something like that, they're still thinking about corn ethanol and they have some very strong opinions about that, many of which are not very positive. You were talking about economists involved in the center and that sort of thing. I'm wondering how much you are or are interested in getting more kind of PR, public outreach, science communication kind of people, or what your strategies are for that. >> We have, as a university, we have education and outreach programs that are very undergraduate oriented. We have these K-12 programs. We provide a lot of material to extension agents across the states of Michigan and Wisconsin to get word out all across the state, not only in the farming communities, but in the inner cities. We were funded about six months before many of the high visibility papers came out and correctly, in my opinion, took starch-based ethanol to task for indirect land use and other aspects associated with that technology. We have spent an enormous time communicating part of what I tried to communicate tonight, and that is that we are talking about new technology. We are not talking about starch-based ethanol. 

I don't know that this technology is going to win, but what I don't want is this country to throw the baby out with the bath water by saying, existing technologies are no good, so we're not going to invest in seeing if we can make something better. We try to spend a lot of time dealing with making sure that people understand what we're about and letting them make value judgments about whether they think this is a good idea or not, and not putting ourselves in a position to say, we've got the Holy Grail and you should invest in us. We don't have technology. We're an R&D unit that are trying to change how we do things. If we can change how we do things, we may be able to help the country keep that corn ethanol line flat, like the renewable fuel standards bill suggested it should be. But God forbid, if we're really successful, the corn ethanol line may go down and we can have a whole other set of conversations about food versus fuel. (applause)