July 26, 2010 Dalian, China--

 

A global decision for biofuels to go local

 

Today I went to a track in the conference under the title “The Future of Bio-energy: Challenges, Trends and Opportunities.” This was fascinating because the speakers spoke about bio-energy (something we’ve all heard so much about) and what scientists really think will happen in terms or harnessing and implementing biofuels in the future.

 

The chair of the track was Dr. Kristiina Vogt a professor at the University of Washington. She started by talking about how biofuels have to be the future as the main sector of technology that can allow us to deal with climate change issues and help local regions improve their economic situation. She summed up the focus of the track as being how do scientists move forward to get over constraints in the industry that are preventing them from reaching their goals (such as consumers not adapting new evolutions in biofuels). One example Kristiina used as a constraint was when corn was bought in Mexico and used for biofuels in the U.S. This decision meant that Mexicans didn’t have enough corn to produce tortillas and the price of tortillas skyrocketed. Just like yesterday, there was the message that scientists need to be wary of possible ramifications in trying to attain their goals of sustainable biofuel development.

 

Dr. Blake Simmons from the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) was one of the first speakers and is originally from Nebraska. JBEI partners with the Department of Energy’s Bioenergy Research Centers as well as universities and the relationship was really interesting. The DOE has three different hubs for looking at how to capitalize on bioenergy – they all have the same funding and same goals but they’re all tasked to go about reaching those goals in different ways. JBEI uses these national hubs, combined with brain power from universities and industry (i.e. Boeing) to find ways to create sustainable, cheap and effective biofuels. Blake said JBEI is trying to put itself out of business saying, “If we’re around in twenty years we would have utterly failed in our mission.” The main point was that when it comes to biofuels everything becomes possible when you can make cheap sugar. Although it may seem simple, making sugar as cheap as they want to make it is an expensive, time-consuming mission.

 

Kristiina, who I mentioned earlier, talked again later in the day and went into more detail on her initial comments about the social impacts of biofuel and how to make it financially viable. She suggested regions cannot just have one biofuel, you need a diverse energy portfolio. You should adjust what biofuel you’re using depending on where you live. Instead of looking at biofuel usage from a national level if you move that perspective to a local level you can find what resources are available where and it makes it inherently cheaper to produce. In fact, feedstock logistics are a big part of why U.S. plants are closing because as soon as the feedstock is 100km or 60miles from the processing plant it is no longer economically viable to transport it.

 

The University of Washington has devised a system to figure out how much biomass you can take out of the environment and still be sustainable and maintain a low impact especially on other parts of the ecosystem like decomposers. One way of making sure you’re being sustainable with a low impact in the U.S.A. is to work with the Native Americans. She suggested it’s critical for scientists to have a strong partnership with native populations moving forward. The reason? They’re very protective of their tribal lands, so if you can satisfy their requirements of sustainability you’ll be able to pass a litmus test with any government. It’s also helpful as you to integrate Native Americans as in many places they have high unemployment and are resource rich. So, biofuel projects will sync well as they create jobs but require natural resources.

 

Another presentation that stood out was by Maura Shelton also from the University of Washington. The IGERT fellow talked about the amount of biomass we can remove from a forest to use for biofuels before we have a long-term negative impact on the environment we’re taking them from. She talked about how it’s a delicate balance, as you need enough material in the forest to provide decomposition like leaf litter and all the little creatures that eat the biomass. She’s working with two Native American tribes (the Colville in Oregon and Coquille in Washington) much like Kristiina is. She also reiterated how you have to be sensitive to their needs to be successful. It is somewhat of a table of three legs balancing between cultural filters and values, forest productivity and business decisions ie. native Americans have to profit financially out of the project to be satisfied. The forest can’t lose productivity for the financial viability of biofuel projects to continue well into the future. It has to work for everyone for biofuels to work.

 

Kristiina’s husband Daniel Vogt (also a professor at the University of Washington). suggested using trucks to go deep into forests to remove woody biomass and convert it into methanol on the spot. (Methanol can be used as a biofuel for everything from cars to cellphones). This makes it economically viable because you don’t have to transport the biomass to a centralized location many hundreds of miles away as well as you’re reducing the fire risk for many of these areas. Firefighters in places like California would surely be a fan of this idea. If this type of mobile methanol production units are created the speaker believed it would create more than 1,000 new jobs for an initial 20 units, with indirect employment estimated at creating up to 10,500 secure new jobs. This idea of mobile conversion trucks really stuck with me as it has positive effects of reducing fire risk and creating jobs, although it cannot be viewed through rose tinted glasses. It’s also a tangible step forward and something we can see as a possibility in the near future. Many of the scientists talked in terms of chemical equations and were further away from implementing any real projects. In saying this, there are still huge challenges that must exist that weren’t broached in the presentation. For example, how would these trucks get into the depths of the forests in the first place and how much can they take and not hurt the forest? This it seems would be a pivotal point for scientists to first determine before they even think of entering the forests and whittling away biomass from the forest floor.

 

I think what I learned today was that biofuels are not going anywhere. They’re only going to become more important even though a lot of the ethanol and biodiesel plants in the U.S. are struggling and consumers seem determined to stay loyal to petroleum. These scientists are resilient and still believe it imperative we find a way to move away from diesel and petrol. It seems they are leaning towards a more localized approach to make biofuels workable. Our old mind frame of centralized hubs for processing just won’t work and have been the downfall of the ethanol plants that have failed throughout America. Getting bioenergy into communities around the world will not lie with big industry or governments but the communities themselves. Scientists know the resources that lie within their region better than any outsider whether that be natural gas, woody biomass or soybeans. The burden it appears lies with them to take those local resources and capitalize on them in a sustainable way with a highly tailored approach to maximize on cost effectiveness and the energy requirements of their community.

 

July 27, 2010 Dalian, China--

 

Talks Demonstrate Progress In Biotech Avenues

 

Last day of the conference and it started with an hour-long conversation over a breakfast of donuts, French fries and Coke (the extensive buffet selection for Westerners at the hotel) with Dr. David Gutnick.

 

Dr. Gutnick spoke at the keynote forum on opening day and is an honorable guest at the conference. He has taught for many years at Tel-Aviv University in Israel in the molecular microbiology and biotechnology departments. At the same time he is incredibly traveled, serving as a visiting professor at universities from the University of Canterbury in New Zealand (my home town) to MIT to Amsterdam. So why is he so acclaimed? Basically he is responsible for a number of scientific breakthroughs in the world of petroleum. He discovered how specific microbes could clean tanks aboard ships while at sea and later converted that technology to land. Simply, he found microbes that could clean up oily messes in a safe and natural way. Naturally you can imagine what one of my questions was to him – what are your thoughts on the Gulf of Mexico? He used the analogy of a city destroyed by an earthquake to describe how complicated and challenging rebuilding the ecosystem there would be. He said it will never be the same and there are so many different avenues of attack, none of which are an off-the-shelf idea. They all have to be tested in the field in small areas, then evaluated as successful. Only then, after millions of dollars of testing and scientific brainpower, can those ideas actually be implemented in a broader sense. He noted there’s also talk of dispersing the oil so it’s not so concentrated or breaking it up into small droplets but these ideas also have the consequence that fish and other wildlife can easily take up the oil every day it’s just in smaller parts and less visible to humans. One of the better ideas would be to use biochemicals to try to eat up the oil but this is hugely expensive and for the companies involved it has got to be a decision of cost effectiveness and speed. He was a very interesting and knowledgeable man, someone I will surely keep in touch with. He invited me to visit if I ever come to Tel-Aviv and I hope one day I have that opportunity.

 

After I ate with Dr. Gutnick I headed over to the conference, which was slowly wrapping up. The track I chose to attend today focused on plants for the future and covered everything from microalgae biorefining by a French expert to what Syngenta is doing in biotechnology by a Chinese expert.

 

Dr. Jean Jenck started the talk on microalgae biorefining. Microalgae (aka phytoplankton) is the oldest plant on earth at 3.7 billion years old. There is so much of it, it’s estimated to be half of the earth’s biomass. Mildly put, it’s an untapped resource. Dr. Jenck’s mission is to find an economical, effective and ethical way to harvest it and refine it for human use and energy. Microalgae has the advantage that it can multiple in a few hours in lab conditions, which for a plant is obviously very fast. It consumes carbon dioxide and produces oxygen while utilizing high concentrations of nitrate nutrients, all helpful for Dr. Jenck, but it’s still a really small industry with 12,000 tons of microalgae per year. They’re grown in part in greenhouse environments with the biggest being a 300ha pond in Israel. Right now Dr. Jenck says the technology is good enough to produce bio-diesel, bio-fertilizer, animal food and human food (health foods, dietary drinks) and cosmetics, with experimentation under way for using it for everything from electricity to enzymes. He made a special point of saying his company is different, as most microalgae cultivation companies focus on fuel, but he said it’s important to also focus on other products, too, as microalgae has so much potential and it can be helpful to society in many different ways.

 

Another notable speaker was Tomas Vanek who spoke about plants for environment protection. How do you deal with waste and contaminated soil from waste depots, smelters etc.? He believes the answer lies with phytoremediation. This can be broken down into variety of processes, which are basically all multisyllabic words that start with ‘phyto’ and mean plants deal with contamination/pollution problems on behalf of humans.

 

Dr. Vanek highlighted two of those processes in particular, one being phytoextraction. This is the uptake and translocation of contaminants in the soil by plant roots to the above ground portions of the plants. He’s also a fan of phytostabilization, which is the use of certain plant species to immobilize contaminants in the soil and ground water to reduce their bioavailability for entry into the food chain. Long words but interesting concepts. One example of phytoremediation working really well was at a uranium mill in the Czech Republic. The mill was built when the country was a part of the U.S.S.R. in the 50s and 60s. Thirty-six million tons of waste was left at the mill and not much care was taken in managing the waste as it was a military institution. Scientists have since planted water plants like cattail and blue rush at the mill with astounding results. Within 48 days of being planted the plants were able to drop the uranium concentration of the soil and water from 600ug/L to near 0ug/L. Impressive statistics. He believes more and more plants will be genetically modified for this purpose, although he did mention the ever present problem that the EU is not the biggest supporter of genetically modified plants or produce.

 

Talking about GMO in the EU, Jaroslava Oversna, from the Czech Republic’s Crop Research Institute, which helps produce biotech potatoes, flax, pea, barley and plums through to tobacco. The Czech Republic is one place in Europe not afraid to try biotech with a focus on quality (as opposed to quantity like many countries) and non-food end products.

 

After the conference ended I went into downtown Dalian to have a look around and there is one common denominator in China – people everywhere. This is not a place to come to relax but rather to people watch and soak in this fast-paced dynamic culture.

The culture is something that has always fascinated me. After watching the Beijing Olympics and meeting the occasional Chinese student at Mizzou or tourist in New Zealand, I was curious to see the country for myself. While I have really enjoyed my time here so far it was nothing close to what I expected. You routinely hear China is challenging the U.S.A as a world superpower but the quality of life and level of poverty here is enormous. In a way it made the country quite endearing while also making me thankful for the small pleasures at home (like ice in drinks). Things that I think are beautiful and the logic I use to process ideas and problems are completely different, sometimes the polar opposite to what the Chinese think or would do. I’ve traveled through many countries but have never encountered such a different way of thinking; usually the main differences go no further than language. This has made my time here quite challenging as instructions and processes are more complex than the language barrier but in all a good lesson in patience. I will definitely be more sympathetic to Chinese tourists when they’re in my country! I want to say thank you to the United Soybean Board and Biotech University Project Manager Steve Veile for the opportunity, and good luck to Mizzou students who will soon partake on the same journey I have over the last year. Good bye from China!