 This afternoon, it's my pleasure and honor to introduce and welcome to Gustavus, Dr. Lee Ryback-Lind. Dr. Lind is a professor of engineering in the Thayer School of Engineering and an adjunct professor of biology at Dartmouth. Professor extraordinary of microbiology at the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa and co-founder and chief technology officer for Mascoma Corporation. Within the last week, Mascoma, the University and the University of Tennessee have announced plans to jointly build and operate by the year 2009 a five million gallon per year cellulosic bio refinery utilizing switchgrass and other biomass as feedstock. Dr. Lind's work on utilization of plant biomass for production of energy is making a significant mark on science and society. His contributions span the science, technology and policy domains and include leading research on fundamental and biotechnological aspects of microbial cellulose utilization. As an educator, I was very interested in Dr. Lind's upbringing. From a very early age, Dr. Lind's parents instilled in him the belief that one's purpose in life should be to contribute to society. As the son and grandson of distinguished academics and social justice advocates, he is doing just that. In 1924, Dr. Lind's grandparents, Robert S and Helen Merrill Lind, came to Muncie, Indiana as young researchers to study the community and complete what they called a small city study. Their research produced Middletown, a book that achieved almost instant success and has remained in print ever since. His father, Stouton Lind, was a college professor co-director of the freedom schools in Mississippi. Anti-war activist and more recently a labor lawyer. His mother, Alice Lind, was a draft consular during the Vietnam War, also became a labor lawyer, I believe at the age of 52 and is now an active prisoner's rights advocate. I tell you this background about the fabric of Dr. Lind's life and his family as a way of giving you context to what at least in part drives his work. While the fabric of the beautiful vest he is wearing today was created by his wife, the cloth of his life was woven by his parents and his grandparents. Dr. Lind is quoted as saying my parents helped me believe I could make a difference both by giving me a lot of love and support and also by their example. My folks have spent their lives trying to make the world a better place and help the less fortunate. His parents well into their 70s are still social activists living and working in Youngstown, Ohio. Following his parents lead, he entered college looking for a path of service and ended up focusing on sustainable energy sources. Dr. Lind holds a bachelor of science degree in biology from Bates College, a master's degree in bacteriology from the University of Wisconsin and master's in doctoral degrees in engineering from Dartmouth College. Lind has received numerous awards including the National Science Foundation, Presidential Young Investigator Award, the Charles A. Lindberg Award in recognition of efforts to promote a balance between environmental preservation and technological advancement, and the Charles D. Scott Award for distinguished contributions to the field of biotechnology for fuels and chemicals. Lind has testified before Congress and advised the Executive Office of President Clinton on reducing greenhouse gas emissions for personal vehicles. Most recently, he was honored in May as the inaugural winner of the $100,000 Lemelson MIT Award for Sustainability, which recognizes and supports inventors working to safeguard the well-being of our communities and our planet. Dr. Lind leads one of the largest academic research groups in the field and has authored over 75 papers, book chapters, and reviews as well as 11 patents and patent applications. In his spare time, he builds greenhouses and installs solar collectors, builds log cabins with his wife, and has raised three children on 13 beautiful acres in New Hampshire. He enjoys music and one time even played baseball before he said he lost his ability to throw the fast one. He is here today to deliver his talk, biofuels, technology, challenges, and their role in a sustainable world. It is my great privilege to introduce to you Dr. Lee Rybeck Lind. Well, it's good to be here. I'm honored to have a chance to share some thoughts and information with you. You'd think with all of those accolades I could spell Adolphus correctly, but I guess not. This morning when I was putting the last touches on this, well anyhow. So it seems to me that one of the things we're doing here, if I'm not mistaken, is trying to imagine what a sustainable world might look like. We've got some human needs of a fairly basic type to meet, a collection of potentially sustainable resources, which is not that large in number. Some might subtract one from this list, some might add one, but it's much more like half a dozen than a dozen. Interestingly, the vast majority of paths that goes from the left side of this diagram to the right go through two things, actually. Plant biomass and renewable electricity. We can complete the picture with some secondary intermediates and notice some things about this diagram. One is boxes that have multiple arrows into or out of them reflect choices. So for example, what do we do with this very versatile biomass resource? Look at all the arrows coming out of that box. As well, we have sole supply relationships, and I note here that photosynthesis is the only foreseeable sustainable source of organic fuels, chemicals, and materials. But you know, it seems to me and I don't want to spend long talking about the importance of the topic here, but this is the way I like to look at it. What are the dimensions of well-being of human society? In no particular order, it seems to me that peace, prosperity, and sustainability ought to be very high on the list. Notice that if you're missing one of those, your society is in trouble. And I note that this business of navigating resources and particularly energy supply is when you think about it, and I won't elaborate this, a dominant determinant of all three of those metrics of well-being of human society. And moreover, while it is true that the current age has a particular convergence of challenges in this regard, frankly, it's always been the case that resource access has been a dominant determinant of the well-being of human societies, and probably always will be. So, in preparing for the talk today, I tried to put myself in your shoes and ask myself, well, if I had a moderate exposure to biofuels, what would I want to know? And this is the best I could do at anticipating those interests. There's one category of questions that involve end uses of biomass energy and where you get the biomass from in what form, so what roles should biomass play in a sustainable world or roles, and what forms of biomass are most promising? In terms of the technology, what are the options for producing energy from cellulosic biomass, and how do these compare both to each other and to the way we do business now? On the science, engineering, and research side, what are the key challenges? Why don't we have a cellulosic biofuels industry now, and what are the promising options to overcome these challenges? And then finally and importantly, on the resource and environmental side, are there environmental benefits as well as potential challenges that might be realized with these technologies, and could enough biomass be produced to meaningfully address sustainability and security challenges without compromising other important objectives? So we'll start with the end uses and feedstock collection of questions, and it seems to me a pretty intuitive way to look at this, and I think a meaningful one, is to simply look at alternatives to biomass. So for example, in the case of food and feed, we have no sustainable and no non-sustainable alternatives to photosynthesis, foreseeably, to feed ourselves and animals, so biomass is uniquely suited, and this is a very large need. In terms of organic materials, both organic chemicals, refining output, but also pulp and paper and lumber, for example, we have in some cases some non-sustainable alternatives, things we can make out of petroleum, but we have no sustainable alternatives to photosynthesis, foreseeably. So biomass, again, is uniquely suited to this need of providing materials with carbon-carbon bonds, but although we think of it as large, on the scale of energy production, this is actually small. For example, organic chemicals occupy 3% of refinery output. We're not really going to address sustainability and security challenges with organic chemicals. In terms of transportation energy storage, what about options that are liquids at one atmosphere, which I claim is perhaps underrated attribute for transportation energy storage, and certainly the way we do things now? Well, we certainly have non-sustainable alternatives to biomass, but again, no foreseeable sustainable alternatives to biomass for storing energy for transportation in liquids at one atmosphere. So for that particular purpose, again, biomass is uniquely suited. Transportation, of course, is a very large-scale use. We do have, of course, non-liquid options for storing energy for transportation, batteries, hydrogen, what have you. We could liquefy hydrogen if we were really determined to do it. You'll hear more from Joan about those options tomorrow. On the electricity side, though, we find we have many sustainable and non-sustainable alternatives, and indeed, many potential very important sustainable resources that are going to be part of making all of this work cash in at the electricity window. So its biomass is not uniquely suited, but it's a large use, and then finally likewise heat. So it seems to me this is roughly the hierarchy for biomass end uses headed by food and feed, but the next big use after that is transportation fuel, and that's how I tend to look at the issue. Also supported by economics, as we'll see. So, well, okay, there are some, I focus here primarily on some of the families of feedstocks. Minnesota's one of the larger producers of corn ethanol in the country has upwards of 20 plants, if I'm not mistaken, and this is produced from corn. One can also take oil seeds, for example, soy in the U.S., or rape seed in the European Union, and make biodiesel with some co-products. In Brazil, they take sugar cane, and in the EU, they take sugar beets and produce ethanol as well as a family of co-products. We have cellulosic biomass, and I do want to make sure you know what that means, and what I mean by that, and I'll attend to that in a minute. But essentially, we can have residues that arise from activities undertaken for other purposes, or we can have crops where at least a co-equal objective, not necessarily the only one of growing that crop, is energy. Switchgrass is just an example. Muscanthus, which you've seen a picture of as another example. Short rotation trees would be yet another. Now, I should mention aquatic biomass, both macrophitic and unicellular algae, is yet an additional category. In my opinion, this is worthy of investigation, but not sufficiently defined today to allow much by way of evaluation. So, it's interesting to note, and I think if you think about this, you'll observe that it's true, that energy, different forms of energy are usually valued in units that don't invite comparison. So, we value oil and barrels, we value electricity in kilowatt hours, we value coal and tons, we value natural gas and standard cubic feet. It's not a particular corn and bushels, etc. It's not a particularly difficult exercise to put this on a common basis. I use here dollars per gigajoule, and, you know, $65 a barrel for petroleum, as at least for now in the rearview mirror, that's $11 a gigajoule, which is actually the same as electricity at four and a half cents a kilowatt hour. Electricity may actually be undervalued now. Oil has just gone in a big price increase, and some, I know, think electricity will soon. It's interesting amongst the biomass feedstocks, soy oil is actually the most expensive source of energy on this list. Corn kernels at $2.30 per bushel. I'm well aware that's lower than the current price. It happens to be the average price over the last five years. It's interesting to note that that's about half the price of oil on an energy basis, and cellulosic crops at $50 a metric ton, which is probably representative, although some will discuss on that point, is $3 a gigajoule. Ladies and gentlemen, at $3 a gigajoule, the purchase price of cellulosic biomass is competitive with oil at $17 a barrel. So we're talking about a, I mean, even if it's $75 a metric ton, it's still a very, very low-cost source of energy. Well, we can also look at the land productivity. If we're really going to be in the interest of trying to produce fuel from land, and here we see that the oil seeds that can be grown in temperate climates, such as rapeseed and soy, do abysmally poorly. If you compare them, they are over five times lower than the fuel you can produce per acre from corn. These are both current numbers, and cellulosic biomass, as Steven Chu mentioned, can be a great deal higher, especially looking forward into the future. For this reason, as well as the high price of biodiesel, my feeling is, look, there may be many reasons to produce biodiesel, but I don't think one of them should be paving the way towards a large-scale strategy to impact our sustainability and security challenges. I think biodiesel is not up to that job, should not march behind that flag, and is, frankly, a distraction towards that end. Part of the, it's a little hard sometimes to figure out how biofuels work, because you kind of ask yourself questions like, well, if we were interested in energy security and sustainability, why would we do some of the things we've done as a country, and you could ask similar questions about the European Union? Well, the short answer is, people have a lot of different objectives that they want to pursue with biomass, and until very recently, I'm quite confident that the dominant policy objective has not been energy sustainability, it has not been energy security, it has been occupying farm output. I don't mean to say that that's a poor objective, but that's what it has been up until now. If you look at various forms of plant biomass, I'm not going to go through this in detail, but the cellulosic ones tend to score pretty well across these metrics, and the others score somewhat less well, and again, we could spend a long time on every cell in this matrix, but the bottom line is that cellulosic biomass is the focus of all studies I know of in any detail that foresee very large-scale, widespread energy supply from plants, and I mean large-scale on a scale that would actually impact in a meaningful way these sustainability and security challenges we face. And the simple reasons are environmentally benign and beneficial production, low purchase cost, and large potential scale of production. This is not to say that new technologies, artificial photosynthesis, algae and whatnot, those are worth looking at. I mean, of the things we can evaluate today, there are very good reasons to focus on cellulosic biomass if the question is large-scale energy production, and Dr. Chu mentioned some observations consistent with that. And so just to make sure what we're talking about, cellulosic biomass is the structural part of plant matter. It holds the plant up. It is not seeds, and it is not edible. You've already seen Emily Heaton's picture once growing in front of her. By the way, one year's growth of miscanthus, that field was cut the year prior to that picture, and of course wood chips are also an example of the structural part of plant matter. And there are many other examples. Some of them are residues from industrial processes, waste paper sludge, potentially various stalks and whatnot, although you have to be careful of soil carbon issues. So that was a little bit on what we might use biomass for in an energy context. And I want to talk now about some of the conversion technologies. What are the options for producing energy from cellulosic biomass? And then how do these compare? Well, there's the liquid biofuel family that can either liberate sugars as the key reactive intermediates generated via acid hydrolysis or enzyme or microbial hydrolysis combined with pretreatment. And then that's followed by a biological conversion, a fermentation process, which could produce ethanol, it could produce butanol, it could produce what I call here biotech fuels. You heard about those a little bit from Steve. I think you'll hear more about them from Doug Cameron tonight. So those are all in that family. Then there's the thermochemical fuel family. Nothing biological in sight begins with a process such as gasification or pyrolysis or some variant thereof, makes small molecules in the fluid phase. So you've converted a solid to a fluid, and then these reactive small molecules are catalytically converted to something with higher molecular weight. In general, hydrogen being an exception, separated and utilities and residue treatment. And finally you have dedicated electricity production which can begin with gasification or pyrolysis potentially or good old combustion and then involve power generation through a steam cycle or combined cycle gas turbine or potentially a fuel cell. Now these are often thought of as mutually exclusive, but that's not actually so. In fact, most processes for thermochemical fuel production co-produce electricity. So heat from thermochemical fuels production, which is exothermic, goes to the power generation. Some very nice combinations are biomass conversion combined with electricity production. Because it turns out you only get about 60% from cellulosic biomass, you'll never get more than 60% of the heating value biologically converted. That leaves almost 40% that you can do something else with. Thermochemical processing or electricity generation or the logical alternatives. And it looks rather the same whether your co-product is power or whether your co-product is thermochemical fuels at the level of a simple flow diagram. So we've got oil refining and it's a very refined industry in the sense of efficiency. The things that show up as waste products in these technologies when they're young become co-product revenues over time. When people first saw this black goo in the course of oil refining, they had no idea what to do with this and now we call it asphalt, for example. So the energy efficiency of oil refining is remarkable, but you can also look at the ancillary energy inputs. And so using that just as a suggestive notion, we're actively engaged, a number of us in various communities at trying to ask, well, what is biomass refining likely to look like? So it's what will it cost, et cetera. And this was a particular focus of a large project I was honored to co-lead with Nathaniel Green from the National Natural Resources Defense Council to entitle the role of biomass in America's energy future, which included 11 institutions, three sponsors. We looked at environmental and resource considerations, which I'll talk about later. But a particular note for the next few minutes, this is the most comprehensive effort I know of that has looked across technologies at projecting mature technologies. And I want to be very clear. We're not talking about things you can do today. We are projecting where the technology will get. But I submit that for many public policy questions, it's actually much more important to be talking about where the technology will get than where it is. The interesting thing is I actually think for many of these technologies, you can predict where it will get with more accuracy than where it is, that's a longer discussion. So this is just one of 24 scenarios and more detail than we're going to look at, but it shows bars corresponding to energy flows. I'm very fond of starting off with 100 units of cellulosic biomass as my energy basis. It turns out that for planting, harvesting, cultivating, transporting and storing that, depending on how you do it, this is for rather high intensity, it could be lower, but it's going to be projected to be less than 7%, less than or equal to 7% of the heating value of the biomass. So that's not a huge investment to bring this stuff to the processing facility. You can get perhaps 54% or so of that 100% out as ethanol, and you actually only need a much smaller amount, about 14% as steam and power. And it's interesting that down on the lower left-hand side is 40% of that original 100% in the form of energy-rich residues, some gaseous, some solid. And again, the natural thing to do with this is thermochemical processing. In this particular case, fissure tropes fuel synthesis, which results in both a gasoline substitute and a diesel substitute. A third of the transportation fuel in South Africa comes from fissure tropes synthesis. This is not exactly a fantastic technology. And it's interesting to note that you put 7 units of energy in and you get a total of 71 out, and so this has an energy output to energy input ratio exclusive of photosynthesis of about 10 to 1. The comparable ratio for oil refining is about 8 to 1. You have to put in about 1 energy into drilling, exploration, transport, refining, and distribution, actually not distribution, just through refining for every 8 units you actually are able to deliver. So no showstoppers there by any means. Well, you can look at the efficiency on a different basis. You can look at the percentage of high value energy products relative to the high heating value of the raw material. And again, this is emphasizing these families of technology. So power only is by the technologies we looked at in the 33 to 50% range for co-producing thermochemical fuels, not only fissure tropes, also hydrogen, with power in the say up to 60% range. And a large family of ethanol with other various co-products that gets many of them in the high 60s and then 70 and up to almost 80% range. Again, mature technology, but we can expect this technology reasonably to be very, very efficient. There are other metrics of efficiency. Let's talk a little bit about price, and let me introduce the axes here. So we have internal rate of return, a measure of reward for investment. Generally speaking, for mature technologies, folks seek to get at least 15% or so, versus the fuel price in dollars per gigajoule of gasoline equivalent. And if you look up on the top margin, you can see how the oil price has marched up from $26 per barrel in 2002. It's 80-something now. The average price in 2006 was 66. So it turns out we use essentially no oil to generate electrical power in this country, and so the economics of power generation are unaffected by the price of oil, which is what's on the horizontal axis. And these are not particularly inspiring returns for dedicated power production. Now, the more the world is paying for fuels, the more economically attractive fuel production becomes. So the thermochemical fraction group, family, is shown here. And the ethanol family is shown there to take a more strategic look at this. Essentially, the bioethanol group, as we project mature technology, does the best from an economic point of view. It's interesting that when we started this study, actually, we were down around, it was in 2003, and people were still talking about whether power or liquid fuels were the most valuable thing to make from biomass in the current market circumstances. That's a pretty open and shut case. Well, what about petroleum displacement? Well, basically, the more liquid fuels you make, the more petroleum you displace, and again, dedicated power is very unattractive there because we don't use any petroleum to make power. So in fact, you end up consuming small amounts of power to make the wheel go round. And the ones that do the best are the highest efficiency ones, which is the bioethanol, along with the thermochemical co-products. Interestingly, on comparative greenhouse gas emissions, on a per ton of biomass basis at constant yield, that would also be, per acre, remarkably similar across these families of technologies, you can compare to a current power mix, which is the bright red, but you can also say, well, look, let's assume we had a world motivated to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. We're not going to only do that with cellulosic biomass, and so we also compare here to a hypothetical renewables-intensive power mix. And the basic message I take across this is there isn't a whole lot of difference at the factor of two level anyway between these various approaches, and of somewhat surprise to some folks, the liquid fuel-intensive options do as well per ton of biomass at displacing greenhouse gas emissions as do the power options. So we've got results from about two dozen biomass mature technology processing scenarios which support the following hypotheses. All of the most cost-effective scenarios feature biological processing, which is expected to be the cheapest way to process the carbohydrate fraction of biomass. However, post-biological thermochemical processing is very important. It's responsible for processing about 40% of the energy in the original feedstock and adds substantially to efficiency, revenues, greenhouse gas displacement, and there are strong thermodynamic synergies since the one form the inefficiency takes in thermochemical processing is low-level heat, and that's the main form of energy required for biological processing. Production of ethanol in combination with several co-product combinations is cost-competitive based on our mature technology projections with gasoline at oil prices as long as the price is greater than $30 a barrel. And so if you look across these three metrics of greenhouse gas emission reductions, relative cost-effectiveness and petroleum displacement, it's the biofuel family that scores consistently high across that. Well, what about science, engineering, and research? Key technology challenges and promising options to overcome them. Well, one of these is feedstock production without a doubt. Right now, low-cost feedstocks are available and processing cost is the main barrier as to why we do not have a cellulosic biofuels industry. But for mature technology, the cost of feedstock will likely dominate the economics just as it does for oil refining. Feedstock production is also the dominant determinant of soil fertility and habitat impacts, plant siting, and the scale to which the industry grows, and hence the impact on sustainability and security. We need feedstocks and feedstock production systems with high productivity, broad site range, easily processed plants, as long as we don't sacrifice these other desirable outcomes, graceful integration into feed and food production and low inputs. And so, in summary, feedstock production is the primary technical factor determining the attainable scale and sustainability of biofuel production, once cellulosic biofuel production, once an industry is established. The other big technology challenge is processing. And since the feedstock purchase cost, as I mentioned, is on the order of $17 a barrel in equivalent energy units, the cost of processing, not the cost of raw material, is the primary economic barrier to be overcome. And if you think in simple but I think useful terms of processing cellulosic biomass in two general steps. The first one is converting cellulosic biomass into reactive intermediates. The second one is converting those reactive intermediates to something you can sell. It's without a doubt. The reason we don't have a cellulosic biofuels industry today is this first business of overcoming the recalcitrance of this low cost but not reactive solid cellulosic biomass. This is the most costly, it has the greatest potential for R&D driven improvement, and it's the key to low cost biomass processing. So the recalcitrance of cellulosic biomass is the primary technical factor impeding establishment of a cellulosic biofuels industry. Now, a fairly simple exercise you can do once you get geared up for it is to build a model, a physical and economic model for a process and ask, what would various R&D driven improvements be worth? And so here's a collection of improvements in converting feedstock to sugar, expressed that first step, the recalcitrance step, expressed as a percentage of processing cost. And then here is a set of improvements having to do with converting the intermediates to the products. And you can see that the largest ones in green are considerably larger than the next one. And note particularly this consolidated bioprocessing one, which is a full 41% of the overall processing cost, a rather huge impact. So consolidated bioprocessing is simply refers to the idea that there are four biologically mediated events in biologically processing lignocellulosic biomass, cellulose production, that's a hydrolytic enzyme which dissolves the cellulose, it's an enzyme system actually, cellulose hydrolysis, the actual dissolution and then the fermentation of the two types of sugars, hexoses and pentoses. And early on people imagine these happening in four different steps with four different biological systems, but one can envision a progressive consolidation just has occurred in oil processing, up to the point where all of these biologically mediated processes can occur in one integrated step. And I just note in terms of the fundamentals that the first three actually have much more in common than the last. They all involve enzymatic hydrolysis, they all involve a separate cellulose production step and they all from a mechanistic point of view involve hydrolysis mediated by cellulose enzyme complexes. The last one is microbial hydrolysis and the more you look at these, the more different they look. Microbial hydrolysis versus enzymatic hydrolysis, no separate step for cellulose production and hydrolysis is mediated by ternary complexes of cellulose enzymes and microbes. So the process modeling part says, gee, if we could do this, this would be transformative. The DOE and USDA recently did a road mapping exercise which says, and I quote, that CBP is the ultimate process configuration for low-cost hydrolysis and fermentation of cellulose biomass. The question now is, well, can you do it? And you have a number of criteria to satisfy. One of them is bioenergetics, one of them is kinetics, and the other is a biotechnology proof of concept. I'll just briefly talk about those. You know, one of the problems in a way for consolidated bioprocessing is that fermentation is so efficient. On a first law basis, stoichiometric conversion of sugars to ethanol is about 96% efficient thermodynamically. And the question is, does this leave enough energy for the organism to do something which is energetically expensive, namely make ATP? Well, the short answer is yes. And we documented this in the proceedings of the National Academy of Science a couple of years ago. Essentially, there are bioenergetic benefits that naturally occurring cellulitic organisms have which are specific to growth on cellulose. And for those of you who might be interested in the details, it was universally thought that cellulitic microorganisms grew off cellobios and glucose. In fact, this one grows off a chain with an average length of G4. And the neat thing is it gets benefits both in terms of the cost of transport and everyone had thought of, well, you add water across a beta-glucocytic bond and you just, you know, you get nothing for it. Well, these organisms are doing a hard job. They're hydrolyzing cellulose. Three out of every four beta-glucocytic bonds in the original cellulose is actually hydrolyzed, excuse me, solubilized, cleaved, is the better word, in the cell, and it's not hydrolyzed. It's phosphorylidically cleaved and the plug gets an ATP for every beta-glucocytic bond. It breaks in the cell. So nature has solved this problem and we're learning how. In terms of the kinetic feasibility of consolidated bioprocessing, let me just impress upon you that the enzymatic paradigm, again, is very, very different. Here we have a cotton fiber and those red dots are yeast cells and this is sort of the yeast doesn't have any relationship to cellulose. Well, here's a naturally occurring cellulitic microorganism, clostridium thermocellum, growing on that same cotton fiber. You can see it coats it. And that arrangement, I don't think I'll go through the details of this particular slide because I want to be sure to get to some of the resource and environmental considerations, but essentially the take-home message here is that when the microorganism produces a cellulase system on its surface, that unit is several fold, like three to five fold more effective than when the enzyme acts by itself. That's pretty good news if you were already thinking that microbial processes might offer a big economic advantage and indeed compared to the conventional alternatives we're talking about cellulase activities at least 20 fold higher on a per milligram cellulase basis and we described in a 2006 PNAS paper this phenomenon of enzyme microbes synergy that the rate is enhanced by the presence of both the enzyme on the surface of the microorganism. Well, if we want to develop a microbe that does this we have to either start with microbes that already produce products well like yeasts or we can start with microorganisms that already know how to utilize these substrates like thermophilic bacteria. Here, published in 2006, is the first study of a recombinant yeast growing anaerobically on cellulose. Now it's not growing much and it's an easy cellulose but nevertheless we're excited about this initial demonstration of capability. We can also take naturally occurring thermophilic microorganisms that make ethanol, acetic acid and lactic acid knock out the genes associated with the products we don't want redirect, electron flow and then here is an engineered strain which my company Mascoma just got a large grant from the DOE to develop further which utilizes xylose, a sugar present in biomass that's not glucose, not the sugar present in corn and produces only ethanol with no other organic fermentation product. So again, the biotechnology proof of concepts you know as we dig into this frankly we're getting more affirmation that this is all doable and feasible and likely to work. So I apologize in this presentation both for all the things I'm trying to say but frankly all the things I'm also not because these are complicated issues. So on the resource and environmental side I'll actually take first are there environmental benefits but then a question you may have been asking yourself and probably should be, namely well how big could this be? Are we really talking about a big solution or a little one? Well when soil fertility and rural ecology advocates people who don't come to the table about biofuels they come to the table about these other issues when they consider replacing row crops with cellulosic perennials and cover crops which is not the only way to introduce cellulosic biomass into the system I realize but when they consider that they like what they see and some of this has already been alluded to much lower use of herbicides and pesticides radically reduced erosion much higher nutrient capture and therefore reduced surface loss of nutrients and nutrification enhanced wildlife habitat and biodiversity strong potential for recycling minerals from the processing facility back to the field and of particular note for this business of carbon and I'll elaborate on this soil carbon accumulation perennial grasses accumulate organic matter at substantial rates on the order of a metric ton of carbon per hectare per year over time frames that are at least many decades and under some circumstances progress linearly for at least a century or at least a thought to based on the best understanding we have and interesting although counterintuitive this occurs faster that is the rate of carbon deposition in the ground is greater when the grass is harvested than when it is not so this also rural economy advocates get excited about this having marked potential there is marked potential to couple and drive these environmental benefits with revitalization of rural economies so let's look a little bit at this greenhouse gas business this is a figure that group of us published in Science in 1991 there are a few of us that have been doing this biofuel thing for a long time and so essentially the observation is that if you remove CO2 from the atmosphere to make biomass with photosynthesis in the course of converting that biomass to fuels and combusting those fuels you return the CO2 you removed so you have the potential for a zero carbon fuel cycle and you may be thinking to yourself yeah okay but there's a little more to that well true let's keep score here are two different scenarios one of them producing ethanol and power one ethanol fissure tropes fuels and power and so the primary cycle shown in the diagram above is pro net greenhouse gas emissions but there are some inputs required for liquid fuel for fertilizer and depending on the scenario that gets you to about 10% of a gasoline base case but there are also co-products produced power perhaps feed depending on the scenario that can actually be a large number you can recycle nitrogen although that's not frankly a large factor from an energy or greenhouse gas point of view in cellulosic biomass production but here are two big ones soil carbon is accumulated as I mentioned what it means to say minus 43 to minus 159 is that the magnitude of carbon flow into the ground can be as great or greater than the magnitude of avoided carbon emissions from fuel substitution and then finally if you can do CO2 capture and sequestration from coal it ought to be somewhat which was discussed in the final discussion it ought to be somewhat easier to do from biomass because at least some of that CO2 is available in a pure stream with no nitrogen at all so we're looking at in soil carbon accumulation and carbon capture and sequestration from cellulosic biomass plants we're looking at production facilities we're looking at two potentials for removing carbon from the atmosphere each with carbon flows comparable to avoided emissions from fuel substitution now neither is infinite but both buy us time and help lower the carbon hump and soil carbon accumulation could potentially be coupled with other values this is not exactly waste material organic matter in soils coupled with fertility enhancement and reclamation of degraded lands so just briefly to give you a sense of what a broad greenhouse gas emission strategy based on biofuels might look like let's define the pie as the total CO2 emissions for transportation and power generation in the United States just an illustrative example well, we could start off by producing one third of our current transportation fuel from cellulosic biomass with coproduction of power you could do other things and let's assume for the moment we get 40% of our power from carbon neutral sources whatever those are and let's assume that we triple transportation sector efficiency I'll discuss that technically I'll discuss that further in a while it leaves us about 30% of the original entire pie so we're talking about a three-fold reduction thus far but we have yet to consider these carbon sequestration opportunities there is a wide range of variability in the literature I want to acknowledge that with respect to soil carbon it's something we need to understand better and therefore could learn to manage better soil carbon accumulation but the range is on the order of 6% of that entire combined total CO2 emissions from transport and power this is accompanying only producing a third of our transportation fuel 6% to 23% of that 29.8% remaining point source sequestration if you could get it all and you probably can't because you won't have places to put the CO2 near the ethanol production facilities would be worth up to 21% and if you add the two together you could be talking about these two sectors having negative net carbon emissions and that's what we call life cycle and resource issues there's a lot of emphasis in the literature on life cycle analysis it's usually considered on a per-unit basis so per ton, per gallon, per mile, per acre and the short answer is cellulosic biofuels look terrific on a life cycle basis from the point of view of most metrics I've already mentioned spectacular potential greenhouse gas emission benefits potentially including being a greenhouse gas sponge going better than zero and also in the end soil fertility, water quality and biodiversity benefits in the NRDC's view several important potential benefits and no showstoppers but there's this other set of issues because I call them resource issues even with positive effects per acre an acre devoted to bioenergy production is no longer exclusively available for food, wildlife, habitat and recreation this is a greater challenge for biomass energy in my opinion simple minded dimensional analysis the benefits you realize are the mathematical product of the benefits per unit utilized the province of life cycle analysis times the number of units utilized the resource question so let's go to the literature actually let's not do that let's do something else we'll get to the literature in a minute but I just want to frame this issue look at the human environmental footprint this is from the proceedings in 2002 billions of global hectares we probably don't carry around a good intuitive feel for but numbers of earths, hey can get our arms around that and according to this particular calculation and you could do the calculation in different ways the world passed its regenerative capacity in about 1980 and the other thing to note is that the things I'm talking about in this presentation namely what we do with energy and what we do with land are about two thirds of the human footprint so we're talking about really not small parts of the human presence on the earth this understates this understates the challenge if we look at 6 billion people and the world is now 6.6 or 7 billion people but if we look to 2003 when we passed 6 billion people the whole world current footprint would have needed 1.3 earths if we all lived as they did then in continental India it would be 0.4 or the Indian subcontinent if we all lived as the USA lived 6 billion people in 2003 we would need 5 earths and even if we assume a western European standard of living and 10 billion people we need on the order of 5 earths and many people have felt that this is not reconcilable with biomass energy the general solution it seems to me is this notion of industrial revolution and this is from natural capitalism by Hawkins and Aymarine Hunter-Levans the first industrial revolution the context was that resources were plentiful and people were scarce the consequences are familiar among them a several order of magnitude increase in what a worker could do in a day the second industrial revolution the one we now need to embark upon ladies and gentlemen has the opposite context resources are scarce and people are plentiful the response needs to be population stabilization which there's some encouraging news on although I wouldn't take it for granted but and I think Steve said exactly the same thing if I'm not mistaken probably different words but dramatic increases in resource productivity that is the service delivered per resource invested as well as reliance on sustainable resources especially for energy well now the literature so I can fill a page and more this isn't all the ones I know of of very very optimistic aggressive projections of what cellulosic biomass can achieve there's legislation that was being discussed in June of a mandate for 60 billion gallons of ethanol for example let me put that in perspective we use 140 billion gallons of gasoline in this country in a paper prepared by the government in Rio in a biomass intensive renewables intensive global energy scenario biomass became the largest energy source supporting humankind by a factor of two midway through the next century and even a projection by Shell showed biomass equaling oil by 2050 made some time ago so you can correlate or you can collect these problem I can find an equal number which conclude about the opposite of these any substantial increase in biomass harvesting for the purpose of energy generation would deprive other species of their food sources and could cause collapse of ecosystems worldwide or from the Washington Post because of large land requirements biofuels are not a long term practical solution to our need for transportation fuels one other from science the power density offered at all the power density of photosynthesis is too low for biofuels to have an impact on greenhouse gas emission reduction well it seems to me that this invites two questions the more obvious one perhaps is who's right but the second one is how can presumably reasonable people differ so radically about it's something which as I'll show you is not particularly hard to calculate and I would observe as well that you might think that these estimates would cluster around a mean but in fact the distribution of estimates is clearly bimodal there's a lot of people who think this could be huge and a lot of people who think that our biggest fear would be if it became huge and it probably can't get there anyway so the world is confused and uncertain on this question I think is a fair summary and it's not the math that's the problem you could do it other ways this is an equation for the net new land I'm not going to go through it in detail it contains five variables it's one line it's readily verifiable that the models are not the issue the inputs are the issue well one of those is biomass productivity and here's just a range of some current values that have been realized up to miscanthus and down to what David Pimentel usually assumes and here's some projections for what could be achieved in the future which go up to 20 tons per day and more to calibrate it at about 15 tons, dry tons per day of cellulosic biomass in the middle United States that's about 3% photosynthetic efficiency on a year round basis well another one obviously is the you can't quite read that that's land area required in millions of acres I apologize but clearly the more efficient the vehicle fleet is the less fuel you need and therefore the less land you need and I don't know of a sustainable transportation's future that doesn't include high efficiency vehicles I think it's really difficult and doesn't make any sense I point out that high efficiency vehicles though are necessary for renewable transportation alternatives for different reasons in the case of batteries and battery electric vehicles or fuel cell powered vehicles without high efficiency vehicles you would have a very small travel radius in the case of cellulosic biofuels you would have an otherwise large footprint so it seems like the height of intuitive reasoning to say doesn't increasing biofuel production mean that either produce we're going to produce less food or we're going to recruit new land and therefore displace wildlife habitat well I would say not necessarily in spite of what's the obviousness that may seem to have because it's possible to integrate feedstock production at a very large and substantial scale into currently managed land food production is usually assumed to remain static or extrapolated in analysis of biomass supply and yet new demand for non-nutritive cellulosic biomass due to cost competitive processing technology would very likely result in really large changes farmers would rethink what they grow and how they grow it and I'll give you some other examples later on one of not much later on one of these is co-production of protein and feedstocks it turns out if you harvest grass early you can get more protein per acre than you can growing soybeans of course either one could be used for I shouldn't say of course but it's thought that either one could be used for animal feed protein and if you don't want to pick on poor soybeans which maybe I've done enough already you could grow large biomass soybeans which are bred to have much larger above ground non-seed parts and also get much larger amounts of cellulosic biomass we actually had a workshop last week in Nebraska wonderfully exciting we all went away really charged reimagining agriculture to accommodate large scale energy production and basically the idea is new demand leads to new rewards and opportunities which leads to a new agriculture this could be new uses for existing crops like corn stover new combinations of existing crops and new and improved crops and cropping systems that we don't even have now and there's a number of examples this is received the most attention worldwide I can just scratching the surface it will different solutions will be attractive in different locations here's one of my favorites here we have a cool season grass planted as a cover crop which we're trying to get a more detailed estimate but according to this workshop and there were people who know much more about agronomics than I do there something on the order of a third of the agricultural land in the United States conceivably could do this if you had an economic reward with benefits to everybody the farmer gets more value the soil fertility is enhanced and so you see the green crop coming up the summer crop coming up through the winter crop so returning to that simple equation I just simply did a very simple exercise trying to understand how people can disagree so much and I think this is the first time that both the optimists and the pessimist conclusions have been reproduced in one framework vehicle miles traveled high and low estimates miles per gallon high and low estimates and according to David Friedman by the way we could drive an entire fleet of pickup trucks and SUVs and still get 50 miles per gallon with advanced hybrids so I'm not assuming necessarily very small cars although I don't advise the fleet I mentioned big differences in process yield big differences in whether we integrate cellulosic biomass production into agriculture and I think the 600 million tons there is actually a small estimate big difference in productivity you can multiply it would take 5 billion acres with the pessimistic conclusion and about 14 million a 380 fold difference between the high and the low scenario so there's a lot of elasticity in this system I think well just very briefly we can anticipate the per acre fuel production increasing about almost 10 fold over where it is today current exports correspond to about 110 billion gallons of gasoline equivalent should we want to use that land for cellulosic biofuels production shifts in meat product consumption without reducing the simply from one kind to another and not even that drastic could liberate enough land for 80 billion gallons of gasoline equivalent we could of course drive less bioenergy cover crops I mentioned soy I mentioned we could drive more efficient vehicles and if you talk about multiple complimentary changes it becomes realistic to consider meeting the entire United States mobility requirement not only from biofuels but with some scenarios requiring little if any new land beyond that now devoted to agriculture to achieve this so here's just another way to look at it graphically the new land required in millions of acres the entire lower 48 states is about 2 billion acres that would be 2,000 on this scale if you take a status quo biofuel scenario low yields current miles per gallon no agricultural integration 5 tons per acreage per year you need a billion acres that's two and a half times the crop land in the United States an efficient process would need two and a half fold less efficient vehicles would need another two and a half fold less efficient energy crops would need less and if you start incorporating this production into agriculture in response to the new economic driving forces you may not need any new land at all now you're probably thinking and I really am almost done you're probably thinking gee professor if any of us could redesign the world maybe these problems wouldn't be so hard but look we need no less than redesigning the world folks we're going from a energy non-constrained past to an energy constrained future and I would ask you to think generically and I think this goes beyond biomass about what our approaches are and what our alternatives are we can bury our heads in the sand time honored we can extrapolate current trends the realest best friend we can hope for a miracle and I think this is a legitimate reading of this paper from science they acknowledge the importance of sustainable and secure energy supplies but they dismiss foreseeable and inadequate to provide for the world's needs and they call for disruptive advances in entirely new technologies whose performance cannot be foreseen or we can innovate and change which is what I would argue the scenarios I have been sketching for large biofuels contribution do we can define sustainable futures based on mature but foreseeable technologies in combination with an assumed willingness of society to change in ways that increase resource utilization efficiency and then work back from that to the present too often pessimistic analysis of sustainability if you take them apart or of the form if society continues to make decisions as if sustainability were unimportant would it happen anyway I don't think that's actually a very interesting or useful discussion if and when we decide these goals are important to achieve there are some very graceful scenarios to get there now I comment if you don't think sustainability and security are important then one or two are fine options but if you do you have to take them off the table you cannot extrapolate the current non-sustainable insecure present to get to a sustainable and a secure future number three is great of course we should pursue high risk things but that's a pretty tough baseline strategy so although change and innovation of the magnitude I've been describing may seem improbable perhaps or not the path we're on I actually think it's the only game in town innovation and change and these solutions will be of this magnitude whether they involve biomass or other resources I'm just going to close by acknowledging the wonderful people I'm privileged to work with many individuals up here but let me mention the role of biomass in America's energy future team the bioenergy science team I'm fortunate to be involved with another one of these large DOE centers in the same round that the Berkeley got awarded theirs and finally the wonderful folks at Mascoma who are trying to make this happen thank you once again we could ask our other panel members to come up and join us please write your questions for Dr. Lind pass them to the aisles and we'll begin in just a few minutes another interesting question the green revolution botany worked to increase the seeds and reduce the biomass are we trading transportation issues for food issues isn't the real unsustainability of a large population of the earth well I think I didn't talk as much about it but I certainly tried to emphasize that this is not a problem we're going to solve I don't just mean the transportation problem I mean the sustainable resource transition we're not going to solve only with supply side technologies the five earth business it's got to have a huge increase in efficiency component versus fuel I understand that perspective and I would actually add to it that there's some people who speak about cellulosic biomass and say we're out of that now because you can't eat it well I don't buy that actually there's only so much land and if we're using land if we're not doing this integration strategy which I think is a graceful way to get food and fuel rather than it being either or there's only so much land remind me of the question because there's one more thing I'll try to be as quick as I can isn't the unsustainability the large population well I mean look we have to stabilize population to have a sustainable world we have to increase resource efficiency of resource utilization we have to increase renewable supply I don't think there's any other interpretation just a comment about food versus fuel that has one spin but I think you can just as validly talk about it the sustainable resource supply versus vehicular and dietary preference can I amplify that's the comment I was trying to make and you actually mentioned it very briefly a lot of land use now is being used to raise crops to feed animals as China becomes more wealthy huge amounts of soybeans are being raised to feed animals to get more meat in China and Brazilian rainforests are being chopped out for that so there's we've now learned that eating more meat or a lot of meat may not be that good for you I know it's hard to say this in Minnesota but if you look towards the future of the 9.5 to 10 billion people I think we also have to consider in the limited resource how much of the resources do you want to be raising animals and how much meat so that has to also be folded in I have a couple of similar questions here I think this is somebody from northern Minnesota here can peat be used for biomass there's a lot of peat in northern Minnesota the short answer is yes for thermochemical processing and probably not for biological processing this is a more technical question what's the potential for ocean based biofuels example Jim Lovelock's giant tubes hard to assess it's worth looking at but this whole aquatic biomass thing is in my opinion it could be very beneficial and I frankly think it could be a bust and I think when things are in that category I think they deserve being investigated right now we can't have the attitude that we ring our hands thinking about the one thing we can afford to pursue that's silly given the magnitude of the challenges we face and frankly the resources that a country such as ours has here's a question for one of the students in the audience what area of study should I choose major or minor if I were interested in biofuel industry work do you see this as a promising field second question is yes my answer is yes that's gratifying for me since I've devoted my life to it you can study biotechnology as applied to either the microorganisms that do the conversion or potentially the feedstocks you can study any dimension of raw material production whether that's integrating native prairie grass species or new crops studying the ability to integrate I mean frankly there's this whole business of strategizing ways again to take this new demand we're anticipating but there is no economic pull for yet to take this new demand and integrate that into how we use land now there's a lot of room for study there there's room for study on the chemical process engineering side because these are new processes that have significant integration in materials handling and design and optimization issues and finally I appreciate more now than I used to that there's a huge contribution for people so I would urge you to find what you like to do and I think you can probably find a place to apply it in the new bioeconomy I would add to that industrial engineering processing the most promising technologies will I think be what I would call hybrid technologies again it was talked about that you don't just do one thing you can do many things and combine them and so absolutely support that study what you love and there will be a place in the energy solution for you before we close here I want to introduce our banquet speaker Will Steger has arrived join us after braving the wiles of the Arctic and Antarctica he braved the vagaries of traveling on 169 to St. Peter and survived welcome to our gathering here I have one last question for you here how do you heat your house what well for any any of you I'm curious how do all of you heat your house I live in New Hampshire and we have a wood burning furnace and I heat my house with biomass and I cut it by the way anybody else want to volunteer how they heat their house I would say officially we heat it with gas but we use passive solar very good windows, infrared coatings don't have it's California I agree but we don't have to turn the heat on until beginning of December we turn it off beginning of March we've never turned on the air conditioner because you can use passive cooling Jim we have a house built in 1744 which has walls about so thick and we have very efficient new windows and so we don't need much heating we still have an oil burning heat but we don't need very much of it Will I heat with wood and I cut it myself too and carry it all water from the lake Joan we heat with gas but also living in California we have a short heating system and we have a lot of energy efficiency measures in our house and we haven't turned the heat on yet probably be sometime November December we use the natural cooling in the Central Valley gets quite hot in the summertime gets up to sometimes over 100 degrees 110 but we have a breeze that springs up at night that comes in from the ocean and so we open our house at night cool it down to 60 maybe 55 degrees shut it up during the day and most times we don't have to use the air conditioning so we try to take advantage of what nature is giving us there I live in Boston it gets cold in Boston I heat with natural gas I have compact fluorescent light bulbs everywhere in the house double pane windows I've taken advantage of every subsidy Boston Edison has given to spell energy efficiency equipment nevertheless my heating bill can get pretty high when it gets cold well I think we should call our panel closed here for the day here it's been a wonderful number of sessions here thanks so much to our panel