Five Questions with Tom Brutnell
by Jeffrey Tomich (St. Louis Post-Dispatch) …A local hub for biofuels research is the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in Creve Coeur. Much of the biofuels work there is funded by the Enterprise Rent-A-Car Institute for Renewable Fuels, a scientific center established five years ago with a $25 million gift from Enterprise owners Jack and Susan Taylor.
Tom Brutnell, who took over as director of the institute a year ago, recently discussed the center’s ongoing work with the Post-Dispatch.
Will there be a particular plant or crop that becomes the feedstock of choice for the next generation of biofuels?
There will be many. In Illinois and Missouri, dedicated bioenergy grasses like Miscanthus hold a lot of promise. These are perennials, so they come back year after year, and they require very little inputs. …
What role will genetic engineering play in the development of these crops?
…So there may be different qualities of the grass you’d want for combustion or fermentation that are not ideal for, say, the rumen of a cow’s gut. So it’s going to be possible to alter the chemical structure through transgenics, through GMOs, to make things amenable to fuel production. … We’re also engineering for improved drought tolerance, improved salt tolerance or other abiotic stresses. Frost tolerance is important. As we move some of these bioenergy grasses into climes that they are not naturally grown in, as we move something that’s normally in the Midwest into the Northwest, it’s going to experience early season frost, so it may need more tolerance to frost, and that can all be achieved through transgenics. …
With oil prices having fallen, there seems to be less emphasis on next-generation biofuels. Is that the case, or do we just not hear as much about the research ongoing?
…But the private sector, venture capital for biofuels has really dried up over the past couple of years, and I think part of it is just not seeing the near-term payoff. We really need to be in this for the long haul and to have anything substantial come online is going to be five to 10 years down the road. I think there were a lot of overenthusiastic projections a few years ago in terms of how soon this technology will hit the market. And cheap natural gas isn’t helping things in terms of encouraging investment in bioenergy. READ MORE
