Sludge Watch ==> The Biofuel Race - New York Times

[Maureen Reilly]

Biofuel Race, The
Illustration by Tamara Shopsin



By MARK SVENVOLD New York Times
Published: December 9, 2007


For millennia, civilization’s main event, the harvest, has focused our 
attention upon the fruit of our agricultural efforts — the kernel, the 
grain, busheled and bagged. So it’s no surprise that the fledgling biofuel 
industry has been similarly focused: America’s favorite biofuels come mostly 
from corn and from soy. But when food crops are used as fuel, difficulties 
may follow. The vogue for corn ethanol has driven up the price of corn 
around the world, putting the poor in jeopardy. (An expert affiliated with 
the United Nations went so far as to label the production of biofuels 
derived from food stock “a crime against humanity.”) Corn ethanol is also 
astonishingly inefficient: because vast amounts of fossil fuels are required 
for its manufacture, every 1 unit of energy nets a mere 1.3 units of 
ethanol.

Is there a better way? In 2007, significant steps were taken toward a 
potentially great second harvest, some of it coming from the byproducts of 
animals, some of it from municipal waste and garbage but the bulk of it 
coming from plant biomass, which is really about breaking down cellulose, 
the key structural component of all plant cell walls and the most abundant 
of all naturally occurring organic compounds on earth. A recent Department 
of Energy study found the United States can produce a billion tons of plant 
biomass annually, yet 400 million years of evolution has made cellulose 
resistant — the term of art is “recalcitrant” — to manipulation. Unlocking 
its complex compounds of sugars, whose potential yield is 4 times that of 
corn on a gallons-per-acre basis, typically requires an aggressive, 
four-step thermo-chemical process. Taken together, these steps have been too 
costly or too energy intensive for cellulosic fuel production to become 
economically viable. Cracking the conundrum of plant cell walls cheaply has 
become a Brigadoon-like dream that has been “5 years away,” as one wry 
observer put it, “for the last 30 years.”

Until now — at least if you believe Vinod Khosla, one of the best-known 
venture capitalists in America, who was a founder of Sun Microsystems and an 
early investor in Google, and who has in recent years invested hundreds of 
millions of dollars into a dozen different biofuel companies using new and 
potentially revolutionary techniques. In November, a Khosla-backed firm 
called Range Fuels broke ground on the first cellulosic ethanol plant in the 
country. The plant, located in Georgia, employs an efficient process that 
eliminates two of the four traditional thermo-chemical steps. Range Fuels 
plans to use timber scraps, wood chips and paper pulp, though it could also 
use municipal waste and even olive pits, to produce 100 million gallons of 
fuel a year.

Khosla has also supported efforts to utilize the power of bioengineering. 
The goal here has been to create bacteria that will, in effect, eat 
cellulose and excrete oil. In February, a Khosla-backed company, LS9, 
announced its plans to make genetically engineered microbes that do just 
that. Another company, Verenium, exploits naturally occurring 
cellulose-eating enzymes in termites and fungus to produce ethanol.

But can products like these go to market? Yes, according to Khosla, who 
finances technologies only if he believes they can be ramped up to scale and 
compete with fossil fuels within five to seven years of their initial 
deployment — without government subsidy. “I believe in technologies that can 
compete in the marketplace,” he says. “Otherwise, it’s just toys you’re 
dealing with. Not solutions.”

According to Khosla, within the next two decades, petroleum, which accounts 
for 40 percent of the current total energy use in the United States, can be 
entirely replaced by biofuels. That’s a half-trillion-dollar market. In a 
kind of biofuels roulette, Khosla, a man with a big stack of chips, has 
covered the table with many different bets. One of them seems bound to hit, 
which would be a Google-like home run for Khosla and would similarly 
revolutionize life for the rest of us.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/09/magazine/09_7_biofuel.html?_r=1&ref=magazine&oref=slogin