Published in the San Francisco Chronicle on February 1, 2007
San Francisco Chronicle

Cal to be hub for study of alternate fuel Group headed by UC Berkeley
wins $500 million grant from BP

Rick DelVecchio, Mark Martin, Chronicle Staff Writers Thursday, February 1, 2007

An unprecedented $500 million grant to develop new biofuels has been awarded to a consortium led by UC Berkeley, making the Cal campus the international hub of research on clean energy and the Bay Area the potential crucible of a new post-oil economy.

Sources in Sacramento said Wednesday that UC Berkeley, teamed with the University of Illinois, has won a hard-fought international competition to land the Energy Biosciences Institute, funded by British Petroleum.

The oil giant announced last June that it would stake half a billion dollars over 10 years on the search for alternatives to oil and gas and was looking for a major academic center to host the project, which it described as the first of its kind in the world.

The center will fund "radical research aimed at probing the emerging secrets of bioscience and applying them to the production of new and cleaner energy, principally fuels for road transport," according to an announcement on the company's Web site. Schwarzenegger hosted a top BP executive in his Sacramento office late last year as part of an effort to win the grant.

The institute is to be housed at the national lab in the Berkeley hills above the campus and will be the richest alternative energy-research center in the world, according to a Sacramento source.

British Petroleum chose UC Berkeley over other major research universities in the United States and the United Kingdom, according to the source.

A spokesman for Schwarzenegger noted that California's recent effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions helped persuade BP to spend the money in the state.

"California is yet again leading the world on clean energy,'' said Adam Mendelsohn, Schwarzenegger's communications director.

As part of the grant, the state is expected to pitch in $40 million to build the new research facility. The money would come from lease-revenue bonds, which would have to be approved by the Legislature.

Illinois, meanwhile, is a major producer of corn-based ethanol, and the University of Illinois houses the Institute of Genomic Biology, a research center on alternative fuels.

UC Berkeley Professor Dan Kammen, who directs Cal's Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory, said the university has more energy experts than any other academic center in the world.

"I happen to think we have the best group of researchers," he said. "The group is growing. There are people being recruited here just because of other projects."

Chris Voigt, an assistant professor of pharmaceutical chemistry at UCSF, said UC Berkeley has become the focus of funding for energy research.

"It really is a global effort that's converging at Berkeley," he said.

The research promises multiple benefits:

-- Reducing carbon emissions as a hedge against catastrophic global warming.

-- Creating jobs and wealth through new industries.

-- Giving an economic boost to rural America through the production of new fuel crops.

-- Helping distance the nation economically from a destabilized Middle East.

The BP grant will expand collaborations that have been building among UC Berkeley departments and between the campus and the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab to explore ideas for clean fuels. It will buy added expertise and technology for investigators pursuing one of the major goals of the research: to replace petroleum as the country's leading transportation fuel.

UC Berkeley has been aggressively moving to become the world's research-and-development center for alternative fuels. The university, working with the national lab, where many faculty members hold joint appointments, is combining its expertise in engineering and the life sciences to bring clean energy technologies to consumers in the next 10 to 20 years.

One focus is solar power, in which researchers are developing more powerful, cheaper ways to convert sunlight to electricity and fuel. Another focus is bioengineering, in which scientists are designing new genetic operating systems that code specially bred microbes to make hydrocarbons, which could be brewed in mass quantities for transportation fuel.

Scientists predict that biofuels will become a critical part of the U.S. economy's shift from oil.

"Twenty-five percent of our gasoline could go away and be replaced with biofuels, a combination of ethanol and bio-diesels, in a decade or decade-and-half time frame," Kammen said.

The university's center of bioengineering research is chemical engineering Professor Jay Keasling's lab in West Berkeley, where workers snip and add wild plant genes in order to code bacteria and yeast cells to make profuse quantities of useful chemicals.

The first such product to emerge from the group's work is a chemical that is the basis for the drug commonly used to treat malaria. Keasling's group is working to extend that success to create other drugs and bioengineered fuels, such as ethanol and butanol.

Six researchers in Keasling's group have been detailed to hunt for wild plant genes that may be suitable engines for fuel production. The new grant should add more researchers to Keasling's operation.

Studying plants that secrete waxy compounds, the researchers think they'll be able to code microbes to make certain combustible carbon chains. If their hunch proves out, further tinkering could lead to the development of various bioengineered fuels, of which the simplest, ethanol, is likely to be first out.

Nobody can say how economical biofuels will turn out to be. Large-scale production would require enormous amounts of plant material to create the sugars microbes feed on. Scientists have to find ways to access the energy tied up in the woody parts of crop plants, such as corn.

Either that, or design new strains of plants that easily give up all their energy in the form of sugar.

Fuel crops would take up farmland that might otherwise be used for food.

"Trying to convert the energy economy into a biofuels-based economy right now seems to me strikingly difficult," Voigt said. "What has to happen is to create a niche which, due to market forces rather than research dollars, pushes and builds it to a scale that's conceivable."

Berkeley and the region will play a major part in the shift, he said.

"This is bringing in a huge amount of money to the Bay Area," Voigt said. "It's already resulting in the creation of companies. It's going to be a huge industry here. With California a strong agricultural economy, it's just going to be enormous."

E-mail Rick DelVecchio at rdelvecchio@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page A - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle