Biofuels News from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Fill 'Er Up With Tobacco? Berkeley Lab-Led Team Explores New Path to Biofuels

ARPA-E funded project aims to produce fuel molecules in plant leaves

FEBRUARY 23, 2012

Dan Krotz   dakrotz@lbl.gov

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Feature

It'll take some doing, but Berkeley Lab's Christer Jansson and others hope to create a new recipe for biofuels. The idea is to take hydrocarbon-synthesizing genes from cyanobacteria (in the flask) and introduce them into tobacco plants. Jansson will discuss the project at the Feb. 27-29 ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit.

Mention biofuels and most people think of corn ethanol. Some may think of advanced biofuels from switchgrass or miscanthus. But tobacco? Not likely.

That could change. A team of scientists led by a researcher from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) is exploring a way to produce gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel from the iconic plant of the South.

Their goal is to engineer tobacco plants that use energy from sunlight to produce fuel molecules directly in their leaves. The leaves would then be crushed, and the fuel extracted and separated. The scientists estimate that about 1000 acres of tobacco could yield more than one million gallons of fuel.

Why tobacco? It’s grown in large tracts throughout the U.S and in more than 100 countries. It generates multiple harvests per year, its large leaves could store a lot of fuel, and it’s amenable to genetic engineering.

But before you fill up with gas squeezed from tobacco, the scientists must first get through a long checklist of pioneering research. Success could give the nation a new source of transportation fuel.

If this sounds promising—albeit a bit of a long shot—that’s by design. The $4.9 million project is funded by DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), which focuses on “high risk, high payoff concepts—technologies promising genuine transformation in the ways we generate, store and utilize energy.”

The project is led by Christer Jansson, a plant biochemist with Berkeley Lab’s Earth Sciences Division. He’ll discuss the project at the 3rd Annual ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit, to be held February 27-29 near Washington, D.C.

Can tobacco leaves hold fuel molecules? An ARPA-E funded project at Berkeley Lab is taking on the challenge.

Jansson will be joined at the summit by other Berkeley Lab scientists who’re pursuing ARPA-E projects, all potential game-changers. These include a way to quickly discover materials that capture CO₂ from power plant emissions, an innovative method to produce biofuel from microbes, and the development of a low-cost flow battery for the grid that could boost the adoption of renewables.
In the tobacco-to-fuels project, Jansson and his collaborators want to create a shortcut in the way in which solar energy is converted to biofuel. Today, one approach to advanced biofuel production requires deconstructing biomass and then using microbes to ferment the resulting sugars into fuel. In contrast, the team hopes to create a plant that grabs CO₂ from the air and converts the carbon into a fuel that’s almost ready for the tank.
“We want to bypass downstream processes like fermentation and produce fuels directly in the crop,” says Jansson. “After the biomass is crushed, we could extract the hydrocarbon molecules, and crack them into shorter molecules, creating gasoline, diesel, or jet fuel.”
To get there, the scientists will work to create tobacco plants that are optimized to take in CO₂, harvest sunlight, and produce hydrocarbon molecules.
For the latter, Jansson will start with cyanobacteria genes that encode for enzymes which produce alkane, a type of hydrocarbon. He’ll then make synthetic versions of these genes that are suited for expression in tobacco. In another approach, Tasios Melis, a UC Berkeley biologist, will conduct a similar exercise with green algae genes that produce isoprenoids, another type of hydrocarbon.

These genes will be introduced into tobacco plants grown by UC Berkeley scientist Peggy Lemaux. Nuclear magnetic resonance imaging of the leaves by UC Berkeley chemist David Wemmer will enable the scientists to spot any carbon bottlenecks in the plant and refine their metabolic engineering. In addition, Cheryl Kerfeld, a scientist at DOE’s Joint Genome Institute, will search the genomes of hundreds of cyanobacteria species for other alkane-producing genes that could also prove useful.

The scientists also want to get as much carbon into the tobacco plant as possible to maximize hydrocarbon production. Ordinary tobacco “fills up” with CO₂ very quickly. To increase the plant’s carbon uptake, the team will again turn to cyanobacteria, which are very efficient at grabbing carbonate from the surrounding water and transporting it into the cell. Jansson hopes to insert cyanobacteria genes that facilitate this carbon transport into the chloroplasts of tobacco plants.

Melis and UC Berkeley scientist Kris Niyogi will also work to enhance tobacco’s use of light during photosynthesis. Melis will use a technique he developed that enables the manipulation of a plant’s light-harvesting mechanisms.

The team hopes to grow their first plant in about 18 months. Their ultimate goal is a plant in which between 20 and 30 percent of its dry weight is hydrocarbon. Promising plants will be grown in Kentucky in a pilot test overseen by the Kentucky Tobacco Research and Development Center, whose scientists will explore ways to optimize the plants’ growth and harvest conditions.

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Companies Face Fines for Not Using Unavailable Biofuel

The following was gleaned from a January 10 New York Times article with the above title.

Companies Face Fines for Not Using Unavailable Biofuel

WASHINGTON — When the companies that supply motor fuel close the books on 2011, they will pay about $6.8 million in penalties to the Treasury because they failed to mix a special type of biofuel into their gasoline and diesel as required by law.

But there was none to be had. Outside a handful of laboratories and workshops, the ingredient, cellulosic biofuel, does not exist.

In 2012, the oil companies expect to pay even higher penalties for failing to blend in the fuel, which is made from wood chips or the inedible parts of plants like corncobs. Refiners were required to blend 6.6 million gallons into gasoline and diesel in 2011 and face a quota of 8.65 million gallons this year.

The 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act, aimed at reducing the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions, its reliance on oil imported from hostile places and the export of dollars to pay for it, includes provisions to increase the efficiency of vehicles as well as incorporate renewable energy sources into gasoline and diesel.

It requires the use of three alternative fuels: car and truck fuel made from cellulose, diesel fuel made from biomass and fuel made from biological materials but with a 50 percent reduction in greenhouse gases. Only the cellulosic fuel is commercially unavailable. As for meeting the quotas in the other categories, the refiners will not close their books until February and are not sure what will happen.

The goal set by the law for vehicle fuel from cellulose was 250 million gallons for 2011 and 500 million gallons for 2012.  Even advocates of renewable fuel acknowledge that the refiners are at least partly correct in complaining about the penalties.

The standards for cellulosic fuel are part of an overall goal of having 36 billion gallons of biofuels incorporated annually by 2022. But substantial technical progress would be needed to meet that — and lately it has been hard to come by.

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Wanted or Not: Alternative-Fuel Cars Flood Auto Show

The following is an excerpt from a January 10 New York Times article with the above title.  It highlights a real problem as the U.S. tries to cope with GHG emissions through greater vehicle efficiency.  That problem is that Americans love their big cars.  Muscle cars from the '60s and '70s are still considered glamorous.  Try picking up chicks in a Smart car or hybrid and see how far you get.

The New York Times

Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Wanted or Not: Alternative-Fuel Cars Flood Auto Show

By NICK BUNKLEY

DETROIT — In the race to claim ever-higher fuel-economy numbers and keep up with government regulations, automakers are rolling out hybrids and electric cars aplenty at this week’s Detroit auto show.

If only buyers were arriving as fast as the cars.

Hybrid sales waned as gasoline prices ebbed in 2011, declining to 2.2 percent of the market from 2.4 percent a year earlier, according to the research firm LMC Automotive. Meanwhile, sales of the Nissan Leaf electric car and the Chevrolet Volt plug-in each fell short of expectations.

Analysts do not expect the segment to grow significantly this year: the combination of gas prices below $4 a gallon and higher upfront costs for the cars is not attracting consumers.

 But that is not deterring Toyota, Honda, Ford Motor and several European carmakers from introducing new hybrid and plug-in models.

“The market is going in one direction and fuel-economy regulations are going the other direction,” said Jeremy Anwyl, vice chairman of the automotive information Web site Edmunds.com. “Just because people start building more of something doesn’t mean the segment grows.”

Regardless, the automakers have little choice but to develop and try to push more hybrids as they prepare for fuel-efficiency requirements that call for significant increases later this decade. Advances such as Ford’s EcoBoost technology have increased mileage for gas-powered engines — the new Fusion midsize sedan it unveiled Monday can get 37 miles to the gallon, Ford said — but bigger gains are needed.

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After Three Decades, Federal Tax Credit for Ethanol Expires

The following was gleaned from a January 2 New York Times article with the above title.

The New York Times

Monday, January 02, 2012

After Three Decades, Federal Tax Credit for Ethanol Expires

WASHINGTON — A federal tax credit for ethanol expired on Saturday, ending an era in which the federal government provided more than $20 billion in subsidies for use of the product.

The tax break, created more than 30 years ago, had long seemed untouchable. But in the last year, during which Congress was preoccupied with deficits and debt, it became a symbol of corporate welfare. Fiscal conservatives joined liberal environmentalists to kill it, with help from a diverse coalition of outside groups.

In the United States, most ethanol is produced from corn.

Nearly 40 percent of the United States corn crop goes to ethanol and byproducts, including animal feed.

The tax credit, which cost the government nearly $6 billion in 2011, went to gasoline refiners that mixed ethanol with gasoline.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, said the ethanol industry had enjoyed “a trifecta, a triple crown” of federal support. Federal law requires that certain minimum amounts of renewable fuels like ethanol be blended into gasoline. Refiners received the tax credit for doing so. And the government imposed a tariff on imported ethanol, protecting the domestic industry.

The tariff, like the tax credit, expired Saturday. But the requirement to use increasing amounts of ethanol in gasoline continues.

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