Biofuel 2.0: Cow Rumens and Helicopters

As readers of my posts know, I'm writing a book about renewable energy for St. Martin's Press. My idea is to travel to places where renewable energy happens and tell stories about the things I see and learn.

This past Monday (Nov. 16) I embarked on my first research adventure, to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. They have a biofuel research center there (CABER), and I met with several scientists working on various aspects of biofuels.

I wrote extensively about this on my other blog, Renewable. (I also posted a bunch of pictures there, if anyone is interested.) Here's a condensed verison of what I saw and what I learned ...

Basically, I learned that turning plants into liqued fuel is much more complex and frankly more interesting than I ever imagined. I've read a lot about corn-based ethanol, and that process seems pretty straight forward, not unike brewing beer or distiling alchohol.

But for reasons that I won't get into here in any depth, corn ethanol has fallen on hard times (thanks largely to the often confusing and misleading "food vs. fuel" problem). And so attention has shifted to next generation biofuels, namely cellulosic biofuel made from non-human food plants like swtichgrass and miscanthus. One good thing about cellusic biofuels is that the earth is teeming with biomass--everything from leaf litter to corn stover--that could potentially yield liquid fuel. But a not so good thing, or more accuratey a very challenging thing, is that you can't simply swtich from corn to miscanthus (a bamboo-like grass native to Asia) and expect the produce fuel right away. The moment you switch from one type of energy plant to another, everything is up for grabs. Everything changes. The most basic question, like which varieties of miscanthus to grow, where to grow them, how to grow them, how to harvest the crops, how to bale the cuttings, how to get the bales from the field to the road, how to transport the stuff to the nearest biorefinery, how on earth to most efficiently and cleanly break the stuff down into its chemical components to get at the sugars necessary to make liquid fuel ... all those steps, and many many more, are in play, and there are very few obvious or easy answers.

Based on what I saw, the good news is that scientists have developed incredibly sophisticated techniques for solving these problems. An agricultural engineer I met showed me a $60,000 remote controlled helicopter equipped with an infrared camera he uses to closely monitor test crops as they grow in experimental fields. (He also uses surveillance towers and remote controlled robots on wheels to inspect crops in real time.) Another scientist I met, an animal biologist, spends his time studying cow rumens, which he described as the world's most sophisticated bio-refineries. Bacteria in a cow's rumen have evolved over thousands of years to become ruthlessly efficient at breaking down virtually every type of plant. So within the rumen may lie one important piece of the biorefining puzzle, if scientists are able to isolate, sequence, and mass produce the bacterial enzymes best able to break down plant cell walls.

I came away from this first research expedition with great hope and expectations, but also great uncertainty about where all this research is heading and what may (or may not) come of it. Do scientists have the technology and knowledge necessary to make cellulosic biofuel happen any time soon, say within the next two decades? Or are we more like dozens of decades away?  Do politicians and policy makers have the foresite and patience to create the long-term incentives and funding necessary to move biofuel reserach forward?

I have no idea. And neither do the scientists I met. All they can really do is keep working, one day at a time.