By NEIL KING JR.
EMERYVILLE, Calif. -- Nature is stubborn. It doesn't like to be tampered with. Train it to give up an ancient habit, and soon it reverts to its old ways.
For instance, how do you make prairie grass more amenable to being turned into sugar? How do you mutate E. coli microbes so that they gleefully turn that sugar into fuel? How, in short, do you liquefy shredded plants into jet fuel to power a flight to Paris?
Dozens of private firms and government-funded labs are now trying to answer those questions. This year's oil-price shock and fears over global warming have reinvigorated the quest for the ultimate liquid fuel -- one that is clean, cheap, easy to make and doesn't compete with food stocks. Nature took millions of years to turn dead microorganisms into oil and gas. Scientists now want to trick nature into reducing that to a day or so.
Jay Keasling, a noted microbiologist who directs the new government-funded Joint BioEnergy Institute here, describes the challenge succinctly: "We need to find a way to domesticate nature so we can create energy from waste."
Success will require scientific breakthroughs at every step, from designing the perfect feedstocks to hitting on the ideal microbe for turning that roughage into fuel.
The federal government wants biofuel production to replace a quarter of all gasoline consumed in the U.S. by 2025. The nation's corn-based ethanol factories are now churning out around 6.5 billion gallons a year -- just over 2% of the country's gasoline intake.
But ethanol's drawbacks are well known -- not least of which that it takes huge amounts of energy to produce.
Mr. Keasling's lab is shooting for something far superior: a newfangled hydrocarbon made from biomass. The advantages of a pure biofuel are numerous. The government estimates that the U.S. could harvest 1.3 billion tons of biomass feedstocks a year, ranging from special grasses to wood chips. Unlike ethanol, the fuel would also be a direct alternative to gasoline and sold through the same pumps.
Making it happen, though, requires some serious doctoring. Cellulosic plants are notoriously tough to break down. You can do it with commercial enzymes, but at huge expense. Even then, fermenting the leftover sugars the traditional way gets you ethanol -- but not the synthetic gasoline that's preferred.
So how to fiddle with nature to make the production of these fuels easier, and thus affordable? Such was the challenge that the Energy Department put before the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which runs Mr. Keasling's glimmering new institute. The DOE last year gave the Berkeley lab $125 million over five years as part of a larger nationwide quest to crack the biofuel code.
The first chore is to redesign the existing feedstocks -- grasses, trees, agricultural leftovers -- to make them hardy enough to grow quickly but also weak enough to break down without too much effort.
Blake Simmons, the institute's director of deconstruction, laughed as he cursed the "impudent pride" of plants that have evolved over eons to withstand harsh conditions. "What they aren't designed to do is break apart nicely into sugars," he said.
So work is under way across the country to engineer mutant strains of plants that would most readily convert into fuel.
The next big hurdle is to turn those plants into sugar. Mr. Simmons picked up a jar of murky liquid in a lab neatly arrayed with other jars of milled switchgrass in various stages of decomposition. "Voilà, liquid switchgrass," he said. The material was broken down in just hours using ionic water -- a decent discovery in its own right, and preferable to costly enzymes, but hardly the ultimate solution.
Next up stands the real Holy Grail: the quest for the ideal "super bug" that can convert sugars into fuels. Mr. Keasling's team is experimenting with mutant variations of yeast and E. coli. A team led by Craig Venter, known for decoding the human genome, hopes to create a synthetic microbe from scratch. Others are searching for the ultimate microbe inside cow dung and termites, which have tiny bugs in their bellies to break down their woody meals.
Even the ideal microbe, though, will need some tweaking to overcome its natural inclination to favor spawning over work. That's no mean feat.
Mr. Keasling and his team share a lofty goal: to find a process, and just the right bugs, that can convert almost any plant into fuel. "Our dream," says Mr. Simmons, "is the omnivorous refinery."
Write to Neil King Jr. at neil.king@wsj.com
Corrections & Amplifications:
The federal government estimates that the U.S. can produce up to 1.3 billion tons of biomass a year for conversion into biofuels. This article incorrectly said that the U.S. could produce 1.3 millions tons of biomass.
EMERYVILLE, Calif. -- Nature is stubborn. It doesn't like to be tampered with. Train it to give up an ancient habit, and soon it reverts to its old ways.
For instance, how do you make prairie grass more amenable to being turned into sugar? How do you mutate E. coli microbes so that they gleefully turn that sugar into fuel? How, in short, do you liquefy shredded plants into jet fuel to power a flight to Paris?
Dozens of private firms and government-funded labs are now trying to answer those questions. This year's oil-price shock and fears over global warming have reinvigorated the quest for the ultimate liquid fuel -- one that is clean, cheap, easy to make and doesn't compete with food stocks. Nature took millions of years to turn dead microorganisms into oil and gas. Scientists now want to trick nature into reducing that to a day or so.
Jay Keasling, a noted microbiologist who directs the new government-funded Joint BioEnergy Institute here, describes the challenge succinctly: "We need to find a way to domesticate nature so we can create energy from waste."
Success will require scientific breakthroughs at every step, from designing the perfect feedstocks to hitting on the ideal microbe for turning that roughage into fuel.
The federal government wants biofuel production to replace a quarter of all gasoline consumed in the U.S. by 2025. The nation's corn-based ethanol factories are now churning out around 6.5 billion gallons a year -- just over 2% of the country's gasoline intake.
But ethanol's drawbacks are well known -- not least of which that it takes huge amounts of energy to produce.
Mr. Keasling's lab is shooting for something far superior: a newfangled hydrocarbon made from biomass. The advantages of a pure biofuel are numerous. The government estimates that the U.S. could harvest 1.3 billion tons of biomass feedstocks a year, ranging from special grasses to wood chips. Unlike ethanol, the fuel would also be a direct alternative to gasoline and sold through the same pumps.
Making it happen, though, requires some serious doctoring. Cellulosic plants are notoriously tough to break down. You can do it with commercial enzymes, but at huge expense. Even then, fermenting the leftover sugars the traditional way gets you ethanol -- but not the synthetic gasoline that's preferred.
So how to fiddle with nature to make the production of these fuels easier, and thus affordable? Such was the challenge that the Energy Department put before the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which runs Mr. Keasling's glimmering new institute. The DOE last year gave the Berkeley lab $125 million over five years as part of a larger nationwide quest to crack the biofuel code.
The first chore is to redesign the existing feedstocks -- grasses, trees, agricultural leftovers -- to make them hardy enough to grow quickly but also weak enough to break down without too much effort.
Blake Simmons, the institute's director of deconstruction, laughed as he cursed the "impudent pride" of plants that have evolved over eons to withstand harsh conditions. "What they aren't designed to do is break apart nicely into sugars," he said.
So work is under way across the country to engineer mutant strains of plants that would most readily convert into fuel.
The next big hurdle is to turn those plants into sugar. Mr. Simmons picked up a jar of murky liquid in a lab neatly arrayed with other jars of milled switchgrass in various stages of decomposition. "Voilà, liquid switchgrass," he said. The material was broken down in just hours using ionic water -- a decent discovery in its own right, and preferable to costly enzymes, but hardly the ultimate solution.
Next up stands the real Holy Grail: the quest for the ideal "super bug" that can convert sugars into fuels. Mr. Keasling's team is experimenting with mutant variations of yeast and E. coli. A team led by Craig Venter, known for decoding the human genome, hopes to create a synthetic microbe from scratch. Others are searching for the ultimate microbe inside cow dung and termites, which have tiny bugs in their bellies to break down their woody meals.
Even the ideal microbe, though, will need some tweaking to overcome its natural inclination to favor spawning over work. That's no mean feat.
Mr. Keasling and his team share a lofty goal: to find a process, and just the right bugs, that can convert almost any plant into fuel. "Our dream," says Mr. Simmons, "is the omnivorous refinery."
Write to Neil King Jr. at neil.king@wsj.com
Corrections & Amplifications:
The federal government estimates that the U.S. can produce up to 1.3 billion tons of biomass a year for conversion into biofuels. This article incorrectly said that the U.S. could produce 1.3 millions tons of biomass.
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