The Energy Department Pursues Cleaner and More Efficient Biofuel

by Tom Temin (Federal News Network) One way or another, bio-fuel will be part of the country’s energy future, especially to power ships and airplanes. That’s why the Energy Department’s ARPA-E is spending some $35 million in grant dollars to improve the efficiency of making this class of fuel. For details, the EcoSynBio program director David Babson joined Federal Drive with Tom Temin.

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Tom Temin: Let’s begin with what you mean by EcoSynBio, the name of the program.

David Babson: Well, the SynBio piece, it refers to the type of techniques that are going to be used to engineer micro-organisms to make the fuels more efficiently. Specifically, they’re going to use synthetic biology to engineer kind of novel pathways and systems to synthesize fuels in a more resource efficient manner.

Tom Temin: Is the energy input into making these types of fuels less than the energy that you get from the resulting fuel, because that wouldn’t seem to be a great prospect otherwise?

David Babson: You’re right. Actually, so the energy that you get in the product is kind of the concentrated form of the energy that was in the biomass. But it is kind of a unique process because what we’re looking to do with EcoSynBio is optimize carbon efficiency relative to energy efficiency. And the reason is, is because in the future, the cost of wasting carbon is going to be greater than the price of avoiding it. And that is to say, as we deploy more wind and more solar, both the cost and the carbon intensity of power is going down. And we need to develop the tools to actually leverage that low-cost low-carbon power to increase carbon efficiency in products. And that’s what EcoSynBio does is develop those new types of technologies.

Tom Temin: And in the final form of this fuel when the Energy Department and ARPA-E mentions aviation, that’s kerosene – is that what the resulting fuel coming out of this whole process will be?

David Babson: In some of the cases, absolutely. So while the program really seeks to make the synthesis process carbon efficient, it really opens up the possibilities for synthesizing a number of different types of energy dense fuels and chemicals, including kerosene types of fuels that could be used in aviation.

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David Babson: It tends to look like a fermentation, like the traditional – people are familiar with the production of ethanol for beer and wine, that evolved natural pathway is what we are using as a starting point. And then we are using synthetic biology to engineer the microorganisms that carry out those processes to allow them to be more carbon efficient, and to produce more product from less input.

Tom Temin: Alright. And what’s the timeline here? You said the program will launch in September? Is it going to take a year do you think or six months to come up with some processes?

David Babson: There are two sets of projects in the program, some are 24 months, and some are 36 months. So within two to three years, we’re anticipating some different types of product outputs, whether those are in individual component technologies that are licensed or end to end processes. The timeline is is short and very ambitious, so we’re expecting to see things within three years. READ MORE