Bioethanol The Way Of The Future?

I decided today while I was working on a presentation that it might be nice if I let you folks know what’s going on in the world of biotechnology. So I’m going to endeavour to do two posts a week, one pertaining to biotech and the other pertaining to important matters such as why I wanted to be a turnip when I was younger. With each course in my master’s programme we’re tasked with developing a product from the bench (lab) to marketing and business organization. This time around I decided I wanted to learn more about biofuels. The reason for this is because there are several initiatives around the world that are seeking to raise the amount of ethanol in gas. What does that mean, well lots of money is going into it, it is a billion or even trillion dollar market. So I want in and so should you.

You might find this strange but Henry Ford's first car or quadracycle (wonder why that one didn't catch on?) was first designed to run on ethanol. As a preamble if I ever get too technical in my rants let me know and if you want things further explained I’m happy to babble even more. It would also be interesting to see what you folks thing about these topics. Alright lesson one what are biofuels? Quite simply they are fuels derived from a biological source, for example plant biomass. The area that I am interested (at least for the next 3 weeks) is extracting ethanol from plants, poplar trees to be specific. There are other sources of bioethanol like corn but these methods are environmentally harsh, and relatively inefficient. Currently most of the ethanol extraction facilities, or biorefineries, use huge machines, expensive enzymes, and lots of energy input. The area that I’m interested in is genetically modifying poplar trees. Now your probably asking yourself why poplars (and why the hell am I bothering to read this but I’ll get to that later) and the reason is they already have types that grow quickly (up to 20 feet in 5 years), have decreased lignin content (woody stuff that gets in the way of ethanol production) and sterility. Now the sterile tree thing is so that genes don’t go out into the environment and give us weeds that grow really fast or boxing tomatos etc. Now where I suggest we improve on the process is put in an inducible gene (you can turn it on or off by say spraying the plant with something like chocolate fudge, that ones for you Jin) that encodes for a cellulase and tagged so it would go to the cell wall, which is where the cellulose is.

This would allow for you to spray your tree with your chocolate fudge and get it to produce this enzyme. Now the enzyme goes to the cell wall and munches on cellulose and barfs out stuff we can use (mainly glucose). This glucose we give to yeast and it turns it into bioethanol. So it’s like prechewing food for grandma and like prechewing it saves time for the next person (begging the question why am I wasting my time chewing when there are important matters to attend to?). Why this idea is so interesting is that you can cut the tree down, ship and store it and these enzymes will still work. This means that there is never a wasted second, and as we know time is money. It's like having a plant that's a factory in and of itself.

In terms of investment in biofuels there are literally thousands of people willing to invest in it. Our friend George Bush proposed an Advanced Energy Initiative bill which is funding start up research. More importantly venture capitalists and other investors are seeking to get in on it.

Now why the heck does this matter to you? Well you’re going to be seeing bioethanol in the news as well as at the pumps in the next few years. In fact in the states by 2010 there will be about 5% bioethanol in your gas. What we should be pushing for is more. The reason it’s not happening may have something to do with oil companies loosing money. To close up our lesson for today there are people that say cars won’t work with more ethanol in them, what you can tell those folks is that they’ve been doing it in Brazil (85% ethanol to be exact) for quite a few years.