Biofuels Group Secures U.S. Grant

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory will head a research group aimed at developing affordable biofuels after the the U.S. Department of Energy pledged $125 million to a new consortium Tuesday.

The research group, which will be made of up of the Berkeley lab, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, UC Berkeley, UC Davis and Stanford University, was named as a recipient of the the grant along with two other groups, all of which will become biofuel research centers.

Energy department officials said the grants were given out in an effort to establish the centers and move toward the goal of making cellulosic ethanol cost-competitive with traditional gasoline by 2012.

Two other centers will be established with department grants in Oak Ridge, Tenn., and Madison, Wisc.

Research through the northern California consortium will begin at the Berkeley West Biocenter but will soon move to another location in the East Bay, said Graham Fleming, deputy director of the Berkeley lab and founder of the center, called the Joint BioEnergy Institute.

The Joint BioEnergy Institute will be aimed at finding a replacement for fossil fuels that can be produced easily, but still contains an equal amount of energy, said Reid Edwards, a spokesperson for the Berkeley Lab.

With current technology, scientists can turn lignocellulose into ethanol, but the process is extremely expensive, said Pamela Ronald, chair of the Plant Genomics program at UC Davis and director of the Joint BioEnergy Institute Grass Genetics group.

To reduce the cost, more studies on cell walls need to be done, which Ronald said will be a focus for the Grass Genetics group at the center.

“We need to understand how they are made before we can break it down,” she said.

Fleming said he is delighted to have the chance to take part in the program and he congratulated the department for making a contribution toward energy research, which he said is vital. “The issue of curbing our greenhouse gases while still providing for the planet is the most important issue for mankind,” he said in a press conference held at the Berkeley West Biocenter on Tuesday.

Terry Michalske, a Joint BioEnergy Institute steering committee member and the director of the Sandia National Laboratory’s Biological and Energy Sciences Center, said he is also glad the department is “focusing on something that will make a difference.”

He added that he hopes the consortium will be able to create transportation fuels for the vehicles in the commercial and private sectors.

Ethanol does not currently contain as much energy as gasoline and the Joint BioEnergy Institute is only looking at the energy source with short-term goals in mind, Edwards said.

Ideally, the consortium will develop a carbon-neutral fuel using butanol or alkali so that current technology could function using the fuel without replacement parts, he said.

The $125 million grant follows BP’s $500 million partnership with UC Berkeley, which was announced in February, and will be centered on researching bioenergy as a whole.

Flemming said the new research center will be aimed specifically at biofuel research, while the Energy Biosciences Institute, funded largely through the BP money will be aimed at researching bioenergy more generally.

“Everyone wants the same goal here,” he said.

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