DOE's Most Promising New Tech: Bioenergy

Bioenergy has shown the best results of the new energy technologies embraced by the Department of Energy in the last decade, the acting head of DOE's Office of Science said in Chicago Tuesday.
But even the most promising technologies have a long way to go before they impact the economy, said Patricia Dehmer, Energy's leading science officer, at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business.
"I think some of the things in bioenergy have definitely made a difference—in the designer microbes and the cellulosic biofuels—although they have not made a big impact in the economy yet."
To be fair, bioenergy got a head start. The nation's three Bioenergy Research Centers opened in 2007, each with $25 million in funding for an initial five years. They've just been refunded at $25 million per year.
In 2009, DOE funded 46 Energy Frontier Research Centers—at $2-$3 million each— on a similar model as the BRCs to work on other challenges, like building a better battery.
"The Bioenergy Centers are six years old now, and a lot of what's coming out of them is making its way into industry," Dehmer said. "We actually have startup companies associated now with the Bioenergy Research Centers, so I think that's a success story."
Startups translate to success in part because nothing appeals to Congressional staff more than a sheet full of logos, Dehmer explained, when DOE needs support.
"You can see their eyes light up when they see the sheet full of logos," she said. "When they see real results from U.S. companies using U.S. facilities, they get excited."
When DOE refunded the bioenergy centers earlier this year, it summarized their accomplishments in a press release:
In five years of operation, the Centers have produced more than 1,100 peer-reviewed publications and over 400 invention disclosures and/or patent applications. Among the breakthroughs the Centers have achieved are new approaches for engineering non-food crops for biofuel production; reengineering of microbes to produce advanced biofuels such as "green" gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel precursors from biomass; and the development of methods to grow non-food biofuel crops on marginal lands so as not to compete with food production.
The three BRCs are led by Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, and by a collaboration of the University of Wisconsin in Madison and Michigan State University in East Lansing.
Dehmer's visit to the University of Chicago, where she completed her PhD in chemistry, was sponsored by the Energy Policy Institute of Chicago. She highlighted the Bioenergy Centers after an audience member asked her to name a DOE program that had produced results in the past decade.
Her regular talk put the bioenergy accomplishments in perspective, however, by reviewing the energy economy as a whole.
About 80 percent of the nation's energy still derives from burning fossil fuels, she said. And in the last decade, even the renewables portfolio has changed little.
"Renewables are fairly interesting. They're sort of the great white hope, and yet renewables have not made a significant impact in the primary energy use in this country. Renewables today are still dominated by hydroelectric, wood, and biomass. That accounts for probably the great majority — probably 75, 80 percent of all renewables."
Among renewables, wind is making the strongest advances, increasing the relative size of its contribution to the energy economy. Solar PV (photovoltaic) still only accounts for about 2 percent of renewables, which together account for only about 9 percent of U.S. energy — "even though there's an enormous amount of talk about solar energy and solar PV."
Nonetheless, the bioenergy advances may represent the first seeds of change.
"With 80 percent of our fuels being fossil fuels today, basically the technology we use is burning them, combusting them, that makes heat and that in turn produces useful work," Dehmer said.
"If we look to the future and essentially where science is focused today, it's something very different. It's looking at the materials and chemical processes needed to convert essentially renewable energy to electricity and fuels directly to that useful work. And that requires a very different approach to the science that we're doing."
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