Lawrence Livermore, Berkeley labs in the running for research funds

Bush administration officials said Wednesday that they will plunge $250 million into a five-year hunt for the ideal germs and plants for producing biofuels as replacement for oil.

Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said the two bioenergy research centers may lead us to an America in which we are actually able to grow and harvest up to a third of the fuel we use by 2030.

In less than a year, Washington has become captivated by the buzz surrounding cellulosic ethanol – the wholesome notion that inedible homegrown grasses, paper wastes and wood chips could lead to freedomfrom foreign oil.

A feverish new industry has sprouted up: plant technology firms to supply energy crops; biotech companies to supply microbes and enzymes to break the plants down into sugars; and almost three dozen firms to build the new biorefineries.

This fledgling industry has grown around the idea of abandoning finite fossil fuels created out of solar energy stored hundreds of millions of years ago, for solar energy stored in the last growing season according to methods honed by evolution.

But federal scientists say these domestic biofuels pioneers aren't capable of making next-generation advances in turning entire plants to fuel.

"They are using today's technologies. We are talking about tomorrows," said Ray Orbach, head of the Energy Departments Office of Science. "For private companies," he said, "This is simply too risky; they call it risk capital. It's just too high."

Even so, energy giant BP in June pledged $500 million for a new U.S. biofuels research center and is talking to five university-led teams vying to host it. Federal officials are equally wary of the potential for a corporate grip on new bioenergy technologies and organisms useful for fueling U.S. transportation.

"We don't know how much of what they're going to do will be public," said David Thomassen, chief scientist for the Energy Department's Office of Biological and Environmental Research. "We can't presume that others are going to do that for us."

A leading contender for both centers is said to be MIT. Another pulls together the University of California, Berkeley; Stanford; UC Davis; and three national laboratories – Lawrence Berkeley, Lawrence Livermore and Sandia – for a team calling itself the Joint Bio-Energy Institute.

Steven Chu, head of Lawrence Berkeley lab, talks of great synergies to be had and said the institute is gunning for both the BP and Energy Department research centers.

"They realized science is developing rapidly in these areas and when there's rapid development there's a potential for something that could lead rapidly to a technology," Chu said.

Virtually all U.S. ethanol today – 97 percent – is made from the starch inside corn kernels. Converting that starch into a single sugar for fermentation into ethanol takes two enzymes or the kinds of biochemicals found in human saliva and cow stomachs for breaking down food.

Making fuel out of whole plants – stalks, leaves and all – means breaking down lots of different chemical bonds. That requires a whole cocktail of enzymes.

The traditional source is a fungus nicknamed "jungle rot" after World War II military doctors in Guam found it eating away at soldier's bandages, as well as clothes, tents and anything else made of plant fiber.

The hunt for a more voracious bug has sent scientists poking into boiling deep-sea vents, the excreta of elephants and the hindguts of termites in the Costa Rican jungle.

"In the backsides of termites alone, scientists found 500 different microbes, most or all involved in digesting raw wood into sugar. So far, they have fingered 100 genes for plant-eating enzymes," said Phil Hugenholtz, head of microbial ecology at the Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek, a federal DNA sequencing facility.

"Those genes can be recombined for higher efficiency at devouring plant cellulose and turning it to sugar," he said. "I think there's a lot of room to jiggle because what's been done has sort of concentrated on a few species of fungus. We've just scratched the surface of the potential."

Diversa Corp. in San Diego is building a massive library of enzyme genes taken from odd places on every continent. Genes for the best enzymes are plugged into well-known bacteria that are used as enzyme factories.

"We yank the DNA directly and park it somewhere hardy like E.coli," said Martin Sabarsky, vice president for corporate development. "What we've found is if you want to breed racehorses, it's better to start with a thoroughbred than with a mule."

Federal scientists also are looking for racehorse plants. So far, the Noble Foundation based in Ardmore, Okla., has an energy crop program that rivals that of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The Energy Department's new centers will delve into transgenic energy crops, as well, exploring ways to make the crops more easily digestible or to break down on their own.

"I can imagine that, given the diverse abilities of the microbes out there, a plant where you chop up your biomass, dump it in a vat, dump in your microbes, flip a switch and ethanol comes out the back end," said DOE's Thomassen. "That's what we're talking about."

This article appeared in the Tri-Valley Herald, www.insidebayarea.com, on August 3, 2006.