"Green Options: Fuel"-Bacteria
Thursday, May 15, 2008SUSIE GHARIB: Those soaring gas prices are driving research into alternative energy sources. One alternative, corn-based ethanol, has been controversial because of its heavy use of food supplies. Now research is turning to ethanol from other resources. As we continue our series "Green Options: Fuel," Dana Greenspon looks at efforts to turn paper scraps and other waste into fuel.
DANA GREENSPON, NIGHTLY BUSINESS REPORT CORRESPONDENT: This woman may look like any other scientist growing bacteria in a lab. But she's working with a super bacterium that can turn materials like scrap paper and wood chips into ethanol. Steve Hutcheson runs biotech start-up Zymetis and hopes someday this ethanol will fuel your car.
STEVE HUTCHESON, CEO, ZYMETIS: We take this bacterium and we use it to prepare enzymes. Those enzymes are over here. We can apply that enzyme to material like this. The next step is to take the enzymes together with some of this material, together with some yeast and now we can come through and make a form of a beer that contains ethanol and that ethanol can then be distilled into fuel.
GREENSPON: Success in the lab doesn't always mean success in the marketplace. Right now, the biggest challenge for Zymetis is getting their product from the lab to your fuel tank. First, there is the issue of obtaining enough raw material to process into ethanol on a large scale and finding sources to supply it.
HUTCHESON: A five million gallon a year plant is going to consume 100- 125 tons of material a day. You go 10 times larger, you can run the math.
GREENSPON: And then there is the matter of transporting the ethanol from the factory to the gas pump. Janet Larsen of the Earth Policy Institute says current shipping methods negate many of ethanol's environmental gains.
JANET LARSEN, DIR. OF RESEARCH, EARTH POLICY INSTITUTE: We're moving a lot of ethanol right now in barges and trains and trucks, but not through the energy efficient pipeline infrastructure, so it takes a lot of energy to actually move that to get to the blenders and ultimately to the fuel stations.
GREENSPON: Larsen also says converting cellulosic materials into ethanol is still far too expensive.
LARSEN: Everybody had sort of hoped ethanol in general would be just this great environmental answer and so far it has been falling short on a number of fronts.
GREENSPON: But Bob Dinneen of the Renewable Fuels Association says the U.S. energy challenge is so great that we need all options at our disposal, including cellulosic ethanol.
BOB DINNEEN, PRESIDENT, RENEWABLE FUELS ASSOCIATION: Ethanol isn't the silver bullet, but it is perhaps part of the silver buckshot. We need to have wind, we need to have geothermal, we need to have solar. We need to have as many domestic energy resources as possible.
GREENSPON: Despite the challenges of commercialization, Hutcheson thinks Zymetis has an edge. His process is efficient. For every unit of energy used to make ethanol, eight units are produced. That notably outstrips the production efficiency of corn-based ethanol and the company has an economic advantage.
HUTCHESON: The bacterium is very inexpensive to grow and we can grow it to very high densities, so that we can produce a lot of enzymes with minimal amount of work and a minimal amount of materials.
GREENSPON: Plans are in the works at Zymetis to bring a small scale pilot facility on line by the end of the year. But Hutcheson doesn't expect his company to be a minor player for long.
HUTCHESON: The scale of these plants will be huge when they go into full production. A tiny plant will be five million gallons a year.
GREENSPON: If he's right, the world can expect big things from this small life form. Dana Greenspon, NIGHTLY BUSINESS REPORT, College Park, Maryland.
GHARIB: Tomorrow, we continue our series "Green Options: Fuel." While this looks like a chunk of ice, it's actually frozen gas and it could be a huge new energy resource for Japan.
