(light music)

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.