UW-Madison Receives Grant For Bioenergy Research Center Agri-View: Crop News

UW-Madison College of Agriculture and Life Sciences Dean Molly Jahn, along with Governor Jim Doyle, UW System President Kevin Reilly and UW-Madison Provost Patrick Farrell, announced last week that UW-Madison will receive a $125 million grant, over five years, from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to create the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center on the UW-Madison campus.

“This center will bring towards the century’s energy dilemmas, innovative and integrated approaches that focus on unlocking the energy potential of currently unused biological materials including crop residues, grasses and wood waste,” Jahn explained.

Governor Doyle also announced that the state will commit $50 million to build the research facility, along with $4 million to pay research faculty. This funding will be partnered with an estimated $50 million that the UW will raise privately.

“This center will be the centerpiece of our state’s efforts to lead the country toward energy independence,” Doyle said. “This will be an economic engine that will translate new discoveries into high-paying jobs.”

The Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center represents the largest research grant ever received by the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, allowing the UW to move forward on research that will relieve dependence on foreign fossil fuels, protect the environment and give strength to Wisconsin’s economy. Centered at UW-Madison the Center will involve nearly 60 scientists and partner institutions, including Michigan State University, the University of Florida, Illinois State University, Iowa State University and the Pacific Northwest and Oak Ridge National Laboratories of the U.S. Department of Energy.

Seven companies, along with Wisconsin utilities, Alliant Energy and Madison Gas & Electric, are serving as core team members, scientific partners or collaborators with the research teams. Also partnering with the Center are Lucigen Corp., Middleton; Flambeau River Biorefinery LLC, Hayward; Edenspace Systems Corp., Dulles, Va.; Stora Enso North America Corp., Chicago, Ill.; Miller Brewing Co., Milwaukee; and Best Energies, Madison.

“University and industry partnerships have become the new standard for tackling large research challenges, because the arrangement leads to stronger alignment between basic research directions and their potential applications down the road,” says Jahn. “We think we have terrific depth and breadth on our industry team and look forward to learning from them throughout the project.”

The Center will develop innovative solutions to meet energy needs n all the way from the ground level by yielding more productive biomass, to working renewable energy solutions into our state, national and global economy n strengthening the research power of the UW System and helping Wisconsin lead the country toward energy independence, Doyle said. “Right now, Wisconsin is helping our country turn a corner, through world-leading research in bioenergy, Wisconsin will seize today’s challenges and turn them into tomorrow’s opportunities.”

“The Great Lakes basin is also no stranger to bioenergy n we already have the most robust ethanol industry in the nation and have led the way in the use of wood chips and grasses for the production of electricity,” said Timothy Donohue, UW-Madison professor of bacteriology and principal investigator of the grant proposal to create the Center.

In the United States and around the world, agricultural and forestry activities create considerable excess plant biomass that has little or no economic value and is often discarded as waste. These feedstocks, such as corn stalks, wood chips and other plant materials, contain energy in the form of sugars, which could be used to create new sources of sustainable, renewable energy.

The Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center will advance these goals through five areas of research:

* Improved plant biomass. The inability of many plants to store carbon-rich hydrocarbons and difficulties in breaking down cell walls in plants present barriers to using biomass for bioenergy production. Increasing hydrocarbons in plants and strategies to more easily degrade cell walls are long-term goals of the Center for improving plant biomass.

* Biomass processing. Efficiently converting plant biomass to sugars is a major challenge to the economical production of bioenergy products. To remove this bottleneck, new treatments are needed for processing feedstocks such as corn stover, switchgrass or wood chips. In this area, the long-term goal of the Center will be to develop new physical and biological ways to process plant biomass.

* Bioconversion. To improve how we convert biomass into energy products, the Center will explore solutions to easily convert plant-derived chemicals to bioenergy compounds. The long-term goals of the Center are to improve methods for converting biomass into ethanol and to develop ways to convert plant material into hydrogen, electricity or other chemical feedstocks that can replace fossil fuels.

* Development of a sustainable bioenergy economy. For a bioenergy economy to positively impact the United States, we must address complex issues in agricultural, industrial, environmental and behavioral systems. Within this area, the Center will take a holistic approach to evaluating the economic and environmental sustainability of transforming biomass to biofuel.

* Enabling technologies. This focus crosses all areas of research, creating the tools that make it possible to integrate new technologies into bioenergy research. The Center’s success depends on sharing the biological, physical and computational research that enable biomass production, processing, conversion and sustainability.

According to the U.S. Department of Energy, Wisconsin could replace over 13 million tons of coal if it converted the 15 million tons of biomass in the state. Biomass resources include byproducts from corn and other crops, waste from food and beverage processing, pulp remnants from the state’s paper and lumber sectors and switchgrass and other forest products.

This is part of a larger federal grant that is also supporting two other DOE Bioenergy Research Centers. They include the DOE BioEnergy Research Center, led by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tenn.; and the DOE Joint BioEnergy Institute, led by the Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif.

The new research centers are part of the Bush Administration’s plan to reduce gasoline consumption by 20 percent during the next decade. In addition, these centers are looking at all types of energy including fuel for heating homes.