Professor Vadim Kochergin uses his fingers to dislodge sugarcane fibers from the inside of a clear, tilted plastic tube in a lab at the LSU AgCenter’s Audubon Sugar Institute in St. Gabriel. The slowly spiraling device, an experimental reactor, has a partitioned interior that lets water move up and lets juiced cane fibers, or bagasse, drop down.
“We can’t take credit for the design,” says Professor Donal Day, observing the process. “That’s Archimedes’ idea.”
The ancient Greek inventor did design the Archimedes screw, possibly to remove water from the hulls of ships. Whatever the original purpose, institute researchers have adopted the model to process a kind of liquid sludge using bagasse, which takes the material one step closer to becoming either biofuel that can generate electricity and power automobiles, or perhaps polymers that can replace conventional plastic, or food additives such as the sweetener mannitol.
Meanwhile, at the main LSU campus in Baton Rouge, Associate Professor Chandra Theegala works with an assistant to engineer an efficient way to bring algae to the water’s surface for easy skimming, using “microbubbles” that slowly carry the material upward through the buoyancy of air. Algae can be turned into butanol, an efficient alternative fuel.
He says the aquatic plant, which is rich in oil, can provide 3,000 gallons of biomass per acre, compared with 50 gallons of soybeans per acre, making it potentially more beneficial for energy than soy, used to create biodiesel, or corn, used to create gasoline alternative ethanol.
Connecting LSU’s academic research on biofuels with the corporate world that could sell the technology and stoke regional economic development is the mission of the AgCenter’s new Biofuels Research Institute, approved by the state Board of Regents in December.
By the end of 2010, the project is expected to provide a public face for research into alternative fuels by LSU scientists—renewable options that in coming decades could replace petroleum products once large-scale industrial applications are perfected.
“Our biofuels research is the best kept secret; that’s the first hurdle we have to get over,” says John Russin, LSU’s associate vice chancellor for research and associate director of the Louisiana Agricultural Experiment Station. He is providing day-to-day leadership of the “virtual” institute, which is planned as a promotional tool for projects that include converting algae, wood chips and bagasse into fuel.
“‘The best kept secret’—I hate that phrase. Louisiana should show up on a national map,” he says. “We have lots of activities going on, but very few people know about it. There’s no 800-BIOFUEL number in Louisiana. We want to evolve to that point. We are always looking to industry to adopt our technology. We try to make it more economical to produce [biofuels] in the state of Louisiana and come up with innovative solutions to do it. We’re advertising it to potential corporate partners.”
Another goal of promoting the research is to secure federal funding. A similar undertaking next door, the Sustainable Energy Research Center at Mississippi State University, has netted big dollars from the Department of Energy: $39 million since the center’s start in 2006. Last year, that included $13 million for 50 faculty members to conduct renewable energy research, according to the university.
LSU’s biofuels institute is setting up an advisory board that could include representatives of state sugarcane and paper producers, Marathon Oil, and biofuel companies Virent Energy Systems in Wisconsin and Ceres and Solazyme in California. Baton Rouge’s The Shaw Group, which launched a subsidiary called Leaf Clean Energy a few years ago to develop alternative fuels, is on the prospective board list as well.
“We want the advisory board to make a deliverable for someone to pick up when it’s ready,” Russin says, “to prioritize in Louisiana where we should focus in biofuels research and processing efforts to tie our agricultural production with the chemical processing industry.”
While midwestern ethanol production is subsidized by the federal government, for now LSU’s experiments require a greater focus on ways to scale up pilot-program experiments to compete with oil and gas in the marketplace. That means adapting laboratory research for industrial use—including building pipelines and retailing biofuel conversion devices—is likely many years away, despite ambitious plans by President Barack Obama to triple U.S. biofuel production to 36 billion gallons in 12 years.
“There’s a lot of talk at all levels of the country, around the world, about this, but the nuts and bolts of the economics have not been put to paper,” Russin says. Still, when the paradigm shifts from fossil to sustainable fuels, Louisiana researchers hope to be in the fast lane.
“We’re notoriously not very vocal about our accomplishments on a national level,” Kochergin says. “Some people, when they consider a state for new factories or new facilities, they don’t really consider Louisiana because they don’t know what Louisiana has to offer.”
He says he has had calls from companies that went to Brazil to explore using sugarcane as a fuel source; the tropical country can process the crop year-round. Still, Kochergin argues: “Why not come to Florida or Louisiana? Agriculture is very much known here, but if you look at biofuels … It will take a lot more development to present what we have to match the interests of the companies. Everyone is looking for cheap carbohydrate feedstock.”
Ceres, based in Southern California, is funding a switchgrass variety trial with LSU as part of the largest trial network of energy crops to date, according to Ceres spokesman Gary Koppenjan. Switchgrass, which looks more like a tall, scraggly bush than a lush lawn, provides biomass—any carbon-based fuel source—that can be converted to ethanol. The joint project is intended to find ideal seed varieties and then “to better understand the economics of growing these crops on a commercial scale,” Koppenjan says.
Work at the Audubon Sugar Institute has led to discussions with BP, DuPont and Dow, and Russin says he hopes the institute will advance that dialogue further and lead to formal investment.
