Berkeley Engineering Blogs

South Dakota’s POET, one of the largest corn ethanol producing companies in the world, announced last Tuesday “that construction will be completed on a $4 million pilot-scale cellulosic ethanol production facility later this year.”   The announcement is rather vague on what defines “cellulosic ethanol,” instead focusing on the great leaps that POET has made in recent months in company labs, which its leaders see as stable enough to form the necessary foundation for “the commercialization of cellulosic ethanol.”  The company is coining this commercialization as “Project LIBERTY” (their emphasis), and, as the name would imply, the focus is almost entirely on the issue of national energy security.  In their words:

“More than 65 percent of the petroleum used in the United States comes from foreign countries.  And our dependency is growing.  As a domestic, renewable source of energy, ethanol has proven to reduce our dependence on foreign oil and increase our nation’s ability to control its own security and economic future.”

Embedded in this statement are many assumptions the company is imposing on their proposed consumer audience, for purposes of marketing their product:
-It is an American right to consume energy in the amounts we do, and access to independent transportation is a right not a privilege.  Thus, we have to find a solution to find enough fuel to support our energy need.
-Any American energy need is disentangled from a global energy need—think nationally, not globally (and certainly not locally).  However, removing the context of the global energy situation is unwise, especially for Americans, as according to the American Almanac, and a statistic which is cited frequently, “Americans consume 26 percent of the world’s energy,” even though we account only for 5 percent of the world’s population.
-Reducing dependence on other countries supersedes reducing our dependence on energy in general.

Cellulosic ethanol, we are told, is distinguished from regular corn ethanol here by the fact that it is made by breaking down the rougher parts of the corn plant–and for POET specifically, the corn cobs.  However, according to research done by Jay Keasling’s lab at JBEI, the technology is just not there yet for breaking down the complex structure of cellulose and lignin to turn it into sugar.  Here we run into the curious interface between corporate and academic sectors, especially when thinking about the open-source nature of synthetic biology associated with Keasling and the profit-driven sector in which his product will exist.

Some questions I have:
-How are habits changed?  The global situation of energy consumption and global warming could conceivably be a large problem requiring large change.  How will habits associated with consumption, lifestyle, and usage of infrastructure be impacted?  From where or whom will the impetus for such change come?
-For many biofuels producing companies, there is a focus on using the current extensive infrastructure surrounding independent transportation (gas stations, fuel lines, etc.).  What is the threshold for abandoning an infrastructure when it is proven to be inefficient?  How might it be reconstructed to allow for less wide-scale waste?  Is there space to find a more efficient infrastructure?
-Who has the power to change standards and how?  How is the right amount of change found?

The world’s petroleum resources are not infinite, and it is understood, depending on which source you believe, that we are either past peak oil or about to roll on past it in the next few years.  This reality is the foundation a search for a solution for a widely varying problem.  One end of the spectrum defines the problem nationally, as an energy security problem:  a search for an energy solution that will keep us independent from foreign oil.  Another definition of the problem is that of an energy challenge:  globally, we are going to run out of fuel–so what can we develop to replace our current dependency on oil?  Yet another explanation of our search for a solution is based not only on the fact that we are running out of oil, but that human use of oil, coal, and cows in the past has extremely detrimentally impacted our environment–so how can we change how we consume and produce in order to reverse our environmental impact?

Two organizations associated with the Berkeley campus are currently investigating the possible usefulness of cellulosic biofuels, the Energy Biosciences Institute (EBI), receiving $500 million from BP, and the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI), receiving $125 million from the Department of Energy.

Here’s a quick video discussing JBEI’s mantra:

A few questions I have for viewers of this video:

-What role does “carbon neutrality” play in the importance of finding reliable and efficient biofuels?  What problem is this trying to solve?

-Is it reasonable to expect that we will find solutions to all of our problems?  Will any of those solutions fit the space cleaved open by the personal transportation industry–that trillion dollar infrastructure?

-What about corn?  Are the problems currently associated with corn ethanol production (the food crisis, suitability for the current infrastructure, land conservation) fully addressed with cellulosic biofuels production?