Engineering Sustainable Biofuels
Released on 01/28/2014
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Mobility, the movement of people and places
across short to long distances,
requires liquid transportation fuels.
And that fuel mostly comes from petroleum.
So the question is, What do you do about it?
How do you address the needs that you have for energy,
for fuels with the fact that you have demand problem
and increasing supply and also this overarching issue
of trying to be environmentally responsible?
So that's the problem.
Into this reality comes biomass, but why biomass?
Well, first, it's abundant.
A report in the US over the past decade
estimated 40% of our liquid transportation
could be supplanted by biomass-derived fuels.
How do we address the need for fuels for mobility
and the context of a need of biomass for food
as well as water to support that biomass,
keeping in mind the fact
that we already have hundreds of millions of vehicles
on the planet that require liquid transportation fuels,
and how do we do this in the short term
on a time scale of much less than the 50 years?
One of the advantages, I think, of biofuels is an ability
to move rapidly towards providing alternatives.
We focus on microbes, which are very small living systems,
and those are naturally able to take sugar
and convert them into molecules we can use as biofuels.
One of the first concepts we teach
to chemical engineering students
is the principle of conservation of mass energy.
Simply put, you can't use more than you have.
The balance between using crops for food
and using crops for fuel.
So one approach to the food-fuel conflict
is simply not to use food crops
in order to produce biofuels.
That won't be enough.
We'll still have to cultivate new crops,
and we need to do this in a way
that doesn't require the water intensity
that currently exists for agriculture
and enforce materials that are intolerant to drought.
We also have to think about how do we cultivate new crops
in a way that's not labor and energy intensive.
How do we get the speed in terms
of having alternatives without doing further damage
to what's already a precious commodity in our planet,
and how do we think long-term while at the same time
trying to have short-term solutions?
And the other thing we have to think about is scale.
We have to be able to take ideas
from a lab into the real world.
Our goal is always to make more
as fast as possible, as cheaply as possible.
The other thing that we do
is to genetically engineer those organisms
to make compounds they've never made before
to be able to engineer plants to be more easily degraded.
In fact, those plants express their own enzymes
that result in this degradation and they're not activated
until after you harvest the plants.
This results in a plant that's easier to cultivate
as well as one that's much less expensive to process.
Once you have those sugars, what do you do with them?
This is the focus of work in our lab and many others at MIT.
We're using advanced tools of metabolic engineering
and synthetic biology to be able
to create custom-designed microbes
to convert these sugars into replacements
for diesel and gasoline that are compatible
with our existing infrastructure so that, again,
we address the problem of the cars that we already have.
This is cutting-edge science.
If we are successful in our goals, we'll have the effect
of drastically reducing our consumption of oil,
but it also will result in really reducing the emissions
that we're putting into the environment which is resulting
in the climate change that we see around us.
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