Institute provides umbrella organization for biofuels research

A consortium of biofuels researchers is poised to make a profound difference in the production of renewable fuel, nicknamed “grassoline,” with an award of $170,000 in seed money from President Jack Wilson’s Science and Technology Initiatives Fund.

Some 48 months ago, an interdisciplinary team of 26 campus investigators established The Institute for Massachusetts Biofuels Research (TIMBR) to develop cost-effective methods for producing alternative fuels from plant biomass. The President’s Office grant is organizational development funding, which aims to help TIMBR hire an executive director and position itself for attracting the booming government grant money expected to be issued for creating sustainable fuel.

“The idea of TIMBR is to organize the research being done at UMass in the biofuels area, because there is a lot of work going on for different aspects,” says Chemical Engineering professor Michael Henson, director of the Process Design and Control Center. “TIMBR gathers all this research together under one umbrella with the idea of getting larger grants than individual research teams can now get.”

The concept of alternative renewable fuel sources to reduce national dependence on fossil fuels has emerged as the key challenge for the economy of the country and the Commonwealth. An essential component is to develop renewable, environmentally friendly sources of energy through the conversion of biomass (agricultural and forestry crops and residues) to biofuels such as ethanol and biodiesel. According to a study by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Department of Energy, the country can produce at least 1.3 billion dry tons of cellulosic biomass every year without decreasing the amount of biomass available for our food, animal feed, or exports. This much biomass could make enough biofuel to replace half the current annual consumption of gasoline and diesel in the U.S.

The expertise of the TIMBR researchers spans the disciplines of biomass feedstock development, biological and chemical conversion to fuels, and process development. TIMBR combines research expertise in plant biology, microbiology, chemical catalysis, biorefinery engineering and design, and economic and environmental analysis.

TIMBR researchers are already attracting individual and collaborative grants totaling about $4 million annually to support biofuels research projects. TIMBR member George Huber of the Chemical Engineering Department also helped obtain a Major Research Instrumentation grant of $513,600 from the National Science Foundation to establish a state-of-the-art Biofuels Research and Development Laboratory for collaborative projects. In addition, TIMBR has set up collaborative relationships with other universities such as Harvard and MIT and is organizing a conference to attract companies from fuel-related industries into its consortium.

“There are a lot of initiatives coming down at the Federal level, and I think soon at the state level, for these large, interdisciplinary, collaborative university-industry initiatives in biofuels research,” observes Henson. “We want to get organized with those larger initiatives in mind.”

TIMBR is led by three principal investigators: Henson, an expert in microbial routes to biofuels, nonlinear system dynamics and control, and systems biology; Danny Schnell, head of the Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Department, who studies plant biology, biotechnology, and biomass production; and Susan Leschine, a professor of Microbiology who discovered the anaerobic Q Microbe, named for its Quabbin Reservoir discovery site, to produce ethanol from abundant plant waste.

Another prominent member of TIMBR is Huber, who co-authored the cover story for the July issue of Scientific American, an article entitled “Grassoline at the Pump,” in which he predicted that biofuels will “fundamentally change the world” in the next 15 years. Huber also edited a 187-page “roadmap” for making hydrocarbon biofuel into a viable alternative to fossil fuel in this country. It combined the expertise of some 70 top scientists and engineers in the field of biofuels and was titled “Breaking the Chemical and Engineering Barriers to Lignocellulosic Biofuels: Next Generation Hydrocarbon Biorefineries.”

One of the first uses for the grant will be hiring an executive director for TIMBR, one with the credentials for developing the structure, connections, and organization to go out and get large-scale federal grants for biofuel research, primarily from the Department of Energy (DOE).

“In that respect,” says Henson, “I organized a conference on biofuels last September so we could begin to build the multi-institutional research coalition that we hope will grow TIMBR into a national biofuels research center, similar in scope to the Engineering Research Center for Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere. We aim to coordinate our consortium to be ready for the next wave of DOE funding.”

More Information

TIMBR website

July 17, 2009.

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