Davis, California
June 26, 2007
UC Davis researchers who are experts at turning plants into
energy for transportation, buildings and industry will be
partners in a new $125 million federal bioenergy research
center, the U.S. Department of Energy announced this morning.
The funds will establish and support the partnership of three
national laboratories and three research universities in
Northern California, including UC Davis, to be known as the
federal Energy Department's Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI,
pronounced "jay-bay").
Research at the Northern California JBEI will focus on biofuels
-- liquid fuels derived from the solar energy stored in plant
matter. UC Davis' work will be based in the Plant Genomics
Program and the UC Davis Department of Biological and
Agricultural Engineering, deciphering the structure of the plant
cell walls being converted to fuels and of the microbes doing
the converting.
The chief JBEI researcher at UC Davis is Pamela Ronald, a
professor of plant pathology and chair of the Plant Genomics
Program. Ronald is an expert on the genome of rice. "We will be
studying rice as a model grass crop, as well another plant
model, Arabidopsis, to understand exactly how the cell wall is
constructed," Ronald said. Other UC Davis scientists will be
looking for microbes that are particularly adept at degrading
those cell walls, which is a key step in the biofuels production
process.
Of the $125 million, about $5 million will come to UC Davis,
Ronald said.
The JBEI partners are UC Davis, UC Berkeley, Stanford
University, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley
Lab), Sandia National Laboratories (Sandia) and the Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). Start-up leadership for
the project will come from the Berkeley Lab.
The energy department today also announced two other national
bioenergy research centers: the DOE BioEnergy Research Center,
led by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tenn.,
and the DOE Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center, led by the
University of Wisconsin-Madison, in close collaboration with
Michigan State University.
"These centers will provide the transformational science needed
for bioenergy breakthroughs to advance President Bush's goal of
making cellulosic ethanol cost-competitive with gasoline by
2012, and assist in reducing America's gasoline consumption by
20 percent in 10 years," said Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman.
"The collaborations of academic, corporate, and national
laboratory researchers represented by these centers are truly
impressive and I am very encouraged by the potential they hold
for advancing America's energy security."
"The selection of the DOE JBEI is a major vote of confidence in
the Bay Area's growing leadership in the national effort to
develop new and cleaner sources of renewable energy," said Jay
Keasling, director of Berkeley Lab's Physical Biosciences
Division and a UC Berkeley professor of chemical engineering,
who will be the chief executive officer for Northern
California's new bioenergy research institute.
Potential of Biofuels
Scientific studies have consistently ranked biofuels among the
top candidates for meeting large-scale energy needs,
particularly in the transportation sector. However, the
commercial-scale production of clean, efficient, cost-effective
biofuels will require technology-transforming scientific
breakthroughs.
Researchers at the JBEI intend to meet this challenge through
the conversion of lignocellulosic biomass into biofuels.
Lignocelluose, the most abundant organic material on the planet,
is a mix of complex sugars and lignin that gives strength and
structure to plant cell walls. By extracting simple fermentable
sugars from lignocellulose and producing biofuels from those
sugars, the potential of the most energy-efficient and
environmentally benign fuel crops can be realized.
"The DOE JBEI will be a center of intellectual thought and
provide energy research leadership designed to meet its program
objectives quickly and effectively," said Graham Fleming, deputy
director of Berkeley Lab.
Bioenergy at UC Davis
UC Davis has a long history of research on the development of
energy from biomass. More than 100 faculty work in the field:
* The campus is home to the California Biomass Collaborative,
directed by Professor Bryan Jenkins.
* The Plant Genomics Program has expertise in diverse aspects of
plant genomics and leading NSF-funded programs in genetic
engineering, breeding and genomics of the grass species that are
models for key bioenergy crops.
* The Biomass and Bioenvironmental Engineering Laboratories in
the Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering study
the thermochemical and biochemical biomass conversion for power,
heat, fuels, chemicals and other products. Research is also
conducted on plant harvesting systems and crop processing,
transportation and storage.
The DOE JBEI Approach
The Joint BioEnergy Institute researchers will tackle key
scientific problems that currently hinder the cost-effective
conversion of lignocellulose into biofuels and other important
chemicals. They will also develop the tools and infrastructure
to accelerate future biofuel research and production efforts,
and help transition new technologies into the commercial sector.
The goal of the JBEI is to achieve measurable success within the
next five years.
"The DOE JBEI will be organized like a biotech startup company,
with very focused research objectives, and a structure to enable
it to quickly pursue promising scientific and technological
developments,"
said Keasling. "In addition, the DOE JBEI will seek
collaborations with companies that have relevant scientific and
market capabilities in energy, agribusiness, and biotechnology."
The Joint BioEnergy Institute will feature four interdependent
science and technology divisions:
* Feedstocks, aimed at improving plants that serve as the raw
materials for ethanol and the next generation of biofuels;
* Deconstruction, aimed at investigating the molecular
mechanisms behind the breakdown of lignocellulose into
fermentable sugars;
* Fuels Synthesis, in which microbes that can efficiently
convert sugar into biofuels will be engineered; and
* Cross-cutting Technologies, which will be dedicated to the
development and optimization of enabling technologies that
support and integrate the institute's research.
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