NEXT-GEN BIOFUELS BREAKTHROUGH

Biofuel advance made in Bay Area, researchers say
Suzanne Bohan, January 28, 2010 (San Jose Mercury News)

"Researchers [at the Joint Bioenergy Institute (JBI) of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL)] have engineered a microbe that produces biodiesel fuel directly from plant waste and grasses…The development was hailed as a major milestone in a federal initiative to develop new forms of [non-petroleum, non-ethanol] transportation fuels…

"Energy Secretary Steven Chu sent an excited message praising the advance…The institute, which opened in late 2008 with the mandate of developing commercially viable alternates to corn-based ethanol within five years, has a $125 million Department of Energy grant…[A] federal law [mandates] for energy security and environmental reasons production of at least 36 billion gallons per year of biofuels by 2022. It also limits the amount allowed for conventional biofuels, such as those made from corn, to 15 billion gallons annually by 2022."

click to enlarge

"Energy officials are pushing to limit ethanol production, partly because it uses a human food crop and valuable cropland to produce fuel. Ethanol also has to be delivered in trucks — a pollution source — because it corrodes pipelines…

"Institute scientists…collaborated with researchers at LS9, a biotechnology firm in South San Francisco, to engineer a bacteria that overcame the primary challenges of extracting fuel from tough plant material called ‘cellulosic biomass’…The bacteria, a strain of the laboratory workhorse E. coli, can convert materials such as straw, wood chips [and other agricultural waste] or grass [grown on marginal land unsuitable for farming] directly into fatty acids used as fuels. These plant-derived fatty acids are called ‘nature's petroleum.’"

click to enlarge

"To enable that, scientists spliced in genes that allowed the E. coli to create an enzyme that breaks down the plant material, releasing complex sugars…To produce enough fatty acids to make [the process] commercially feasible, [the scientists] had to rig the bacteria to keep eating, even after it no longer needs to, and to release the fatty acids it produces…[and] succeeded in taking off the bacteria's internal controls over fatty acid, or biodiesel, production.

"The challenge now is going from laboratory flask to commercial-scale fermentation tanks to produce vast quantities of fuel…[The scientists and researchers have] hopes of developing an economically viable production system within two years…[They] also plan to manipulate bacteria to produce biodiesel for jet planes."