Codexis CEO Alan Shaw explains how the U.S. can benefit from Brazilian production methods. (OnPoint, 09/22/2010)
From plastics to chemicals to the gas pump, the U.S. economy is built on oil. Energy-dense and flexible, crude's success seems impossible to replicate. But in labs across the country, researchers are struggling to realize, through cutting-edge biotechnology and traditional farming, how our economy could turn without oil.
Down on a farm in Illinois, his forearm stuck inside the noisome gut of a living and otherwise unperturbed brown cow, Matthias Hess, a German-born microbiologist and geneticist, felt far removed from the white hum of his biology lab.
Hess had been fishing in the cow's rumen, its largest stomach, for a nylon mesh sack resembling an oversized teabag. The stink of vomit mixed with rotten eggs and fertilizer. Working through a permanent rubberized hole carved into the heifer's side, Hess waited for its half-digested slop to churn, freeing his hand. Then he pulled out the teabag, which three days earlier he had stuffed with pulverized prairie grass.
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| Michael Hess, a German microbiologist, explores the rumen of a "fistulated" cow at a University of Illinois research farm. Courtesy of Michael Hess. |
The rumen is like a huge bathtub, he said, holding about 50 large soda bottles' worth of fluid redolent with bacteria. Relying on these symbiotic microbes, cows eat up to 150 pounds of grass a day, a food inedible to most animals, including humans. Hess was after those microbial secrets, and the placid heifer was happy to oblige.
"You can just do your experiment," he said later. "The cows don't really care."
Unglamorous as it may sound, Hess and his fellow researchers are at the forefront of one of the defining scientific pursuits of our time. It's a hunt that, if successful, could reshape the world's landscape, sending biofuel prices through the floor and allowing a drastic reduction in the country's oil use. It's a long campaign, and the opposition is all around.
It is a war, at its most fundamental, against plants.
| 06/01/2011 | BIOFUELS: Energy future that U.S. covets takes shape -- in BrazilAmyris, perhaps the hottest biofuel company around, seems like the model American startup. Based just outside San Francisco, Amyris could begin to push the United States off its oil-based economy toward what Energy Secretary Steven Chu calls the "glucose economy." Using crop-derived sugars as its power source, rather than petroleum, vats of Amyris' bugs could provide carbon-neutral fuel for fleets of heavy trucks and planes within a decade. But if Amyris does all this, it won't be in the United States. It will be in Brazil. |  Greenwire |
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| 04/20/2011 | BIOTECH: Scientists brew 'green' dispersants in Gulf spill's wakeDuring the early days of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, Ponisseril Somasundaran, a chemical engineer at Columbia University, received an email from a colleague who needed help. Somasundaran is one of the world's foremost experts in surfactants, the essential ingredient in dispersants. The government was debating how to break up the oil. Could he come to Louisiana? Somasundaran got on a plane. It's what you do when Lisa Jackson comes calling. | Greenwire |
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| 03/29/2011 | BIOFUELS: As algae bloom fades, photosynthesis hopes still shineFew stories in the energy business are as seductive as that of algae biofuels. Using sunlight, CO2 and little else, many varieties of fast-growing pond scum, when starved of nutrients, quickly build up oil in their cells. They need no external sugar from corn or cane to grow, so they don't compete with food crops. Farmed in ponds or translucent reactors, microalgae can be raised on cheap, sun-splashed land that is unsuitable for crops or much of anything else. That was the idea, anyway, of a host of startups that launched into algae fuels over the past half decade. Often ignorant of algae's biology, these companies stumbled into major physical and engineering hurdles that can derail most of their lofty goals, industry and government experts say. Even the most promising approaches are a decade or more away, experts say. By then, many firms will have failed. | Greenwire |
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