White House Selects UMass Amherst Researcher to Receive Funding to Convert Carbon Dioxide Emissions to Fuels

April 29, 2010

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Janet Lathrop 413/545-0444

Vice President Biden Lauds Derek Lovley for Transformational Clean Energy Work

WASHINGTON – Vice President Joe Biden announced today that the U.S. Department of Energy has awarded microbiologist Derek Lovley and colleagues at the University of Massachusetts Amherst an initial $1 million research grant to develop a clean, highly efficient new technology for converting carbon dioxide into transportation fuels. The process will yield the fuel butanol and other useful chemicals, for example, butanediol, from which plastics are made.

UMass Amherst was among 37 leading research institutions to receive funding today for projects that could fundamentally change the way the country uses and produces energy, according to Biden. The vice president said, “Thanks to the Recovery Act, dozens of cutting-edge research projects with the potential to dramatically transform how we use energy in this country will now be able to get underway. By investing in our top researchers, we’re not only continuing in the spirit of American innovation, but helping to build a competitive American clean energy industry that will create secure jobs for years to come.”

Known as microbial electrosynthesis (ME), the technology is based on the discovery in Lovley’s UMass Amherst lab that some specialized microorganisms can feed on electrons delivered with electrodes. These bacteria live on the electrodes and use electrons released from them as their food source. “ME is basically a new form of photosynthesis, in which carbon dioxide and water are combined to produce organic compounds and oxygen is released as a byproduct,” Lovley explains.

Electric energy powers the microbes to “breathe in” the carbon dioxide and “exhale” fuels and chemicals, he adds. Any source of electricity will do, but the technology is primarily designed to be used with solar panels, to power the microbes with clean, renewable solar energy. A notable advantage to this new method is that the photovoltaics, or solar panels, can harvest solar energy 100 times more effectively than plants.

Further, ME can be used to scrub carbon dioxide out of the environment at places where that greenhouse gas is highly concentrated and emitted into the atmosphere, for example, at smokestacks of coal-fired power plants. The ME process could help to reduce the carbon footprint of existing CO2 emitters, Lovley confirms.

At present, the researchers have conducted ME experiments in a laboratory bench-top apparatus, but as part of the Energy Department’s grant they’ll be exploring how best to ramp up the scale toward commercially viable amounts of fuel and chemicals.

“One reason this grant is so exciting is that we go directly from carbon dioxide to fuel, bypassing all kinds of difficulties that are encountered in producing fuels from biomass,” says Lovley. “We are very excited about the high efficiencies of this method and the promise of extremely high payback for the investment in this new alternative energy process.”

ME technology produces organic products directly from carbon dioxide, which is much more efficient than plant-based approaches such as fermentation to ethanol that requires adding energy for processing and that produces a great deal of waste in generating a product. Also, ME should produce fuels that can be put to immediate use in existing refineries and chemical plants without running environmental risks associated with petroleum, using less water and without the need for intensive biomass crop farming.

Another reason ME can be revolutionary in our nation’s energy future is that sunlight is the most abundant source of renewable energy available and ME technology solves one of the major problems of using it: electricity storage. Photovoltaics for converting the sun’s energy into electricity is well developed, but solar panels only produce power when the sun is shining. Storing electricity is difficult, but ME technology can convert the electrical energy directly into fuels and chemicals, which are easily stored. These products can then be distributed on an as-needed basis, using existing pipelines and grids.

Besides Lovley, other principal investigators at UMass Amherst include microbiologist Kelly Nevin and polymer scientist Thomas Russell. The campus will collaborate with the University of California San Diego and a San Diego-based biotech company, Genomatica, on the project.

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