materials close to where they’re grown, and an inexpensive way to break down, or deconstruct, the plant materials so the sugars inside can be accessed for fermentation on their way to becoming biofuel.
Bruce Dale, a biochemical engineering professor at MSU, directs the GLBRC’s research on deconstruction. He’s experimenting with pre-treating cellulosic materials with ammonia so they can be deconstructed more easily. “Mother Nature didn’t make cellulose easy to break down,” Dale explains. “We use heat, chemicals, or energy to break open the plant cell wall to access sugars easier and make fuels out of non-food plant material.”
Commercial biofuel from non-food sources is already available in a few places, like Europe, but not yet in the United States. The “big gorilla in the room,” Slater says, is Brazil, which already produces a large amount of its fuel from homegrown sugar cane. The United States wants to be competitive with Brazil in the world biofuels market, which is one reason the DOE recently renewed its funding of the bioenergy research centers through 2017.
Most of the ethanol that’s added to gasoline in the United States is made from corn, which is easy to transport. But harvesting food crops for use as fuel can wreak havoc on commodities markets, and economists don’t see corn-based ethanol as a sustainable replacement for petroleum. However, Slater believes the U.S. is just a few years away from putting fuel derived from non-food biomass on the market.
“In the next five years, I believe [non-food-based biofuel] will become more prevalent in the U.S. market,” Slater adds. “But transportation and getting sufficient supplies to processing facilities will still be an issue after we figure out the technical challenge of deconstructing biomass, which we’re close to doing.”
