Professors' Invention Promises Major Advance in Biofuel Production
Dr. Steven Hutcheson decided to go into the biofuels business while listening to George Bush’s 2006 State of the Union address. “America is addicted to oil…,” Bush said publicly for the first time. “The best way to break this addiction is through technology.” Among other initiatives, the president announced funding for research in cutting-edge methods of ethanol production, not just from corn grain, but from wood chips and corn stalks, and energy crops like switch grass.
Chesapeake Bay Bacteria Key to Biofuel Technology
Dr. Hutcheson shows a culture of the rare bacterium found in the Chesapeake Bay more than 20 years ago.
Dr. Hutcheson has developed a technology that can convert all kinds of biomass - from switchgrass to paper trash - into ethanol.
Hutcheson, a professor in the College of Chemical and Life Sciences Department of Cell Biology and Molecular Genetics, held the key to one such innovative approach to produce biofuels. It involved a rare cellulose-eating bacterium found in the Chesapeake Bay.
Professor Emeritus Ron Weiner, who had a thorough understanding of the cell biology of the bacterium, Saccharophagus degradans, and Hutcheson convinced the Department of Energy to sequence its genome in 2003. This data allowed them to crack into its potential for biofuel production. “We realized as we were going through the genome sequence, that it had every enzyme needed to digest the plant cell wall,” Hutcheson recalls. “I knew there was a growing push to start using cellulosic materials as a fuel source, and this seemed to be the perfect organism to do that.”
Moving from Lab to Market
Hutcheson has since developed a patent-pending enzyme technology which is licensed through his University of Maryland spin off company Zymetis, Inc. The enzyme mixture, called EthazymeTM, aids in the conversion of all kinds of biomass – from switch grass to waste paper – into ethanol.
Hutcheson and Weiner together won the university’s Office of Technology Commercialization Inventor of the Year Award in 2007 (in Life Sciences category) for the enzyme system invention. It has the potential to yield ethanol at a significantly lower cost than current technologies.
Time Lapse Video of Ethazyme at Work:
Right beaker, Zymetis enzymes break down newspaper into ethanol-ready sugars over 36 hours. Left beaker, a salt water control sample, also with newspaper. The Zymetis commercial enzymes break down cellulosic material at a significantly more rapid pace.
The Biofuel of the Future
The 2007 Energy Bill passed by Congress and President Bush last December included a mandate to increase biofuel production in the US to 36 billion gallons annually by 2022. Although this bill specifies that 21 billion gallons of that amount must come from advanced sources, such as cellulosic biomass, it may also increase the production of corn ethanol from 7 billion gallons/year to 15 billion/year over the next 14 years and exacerbate the problems already associated with that industry.
“Right now, we are converting food to fuel, and there are moral issues associated with that,” Hutcheson says of the current corn-based ethanol production process. “It also has a huge economic impact, because you have two competing uses for the same product.” For these reasons, the cellulosic ethanol that Hutcheson and Zymetis can produce may be the biofuel of the future. Compared to all other available biofuels, it yields the largest amount of fuel energy for the amount of fossil fuel energy used to make it, and requires the smallest amount of land to produce. Hutcheson estimates that biomass from an energy crop could yield as many as 1000 gallons of fuel per acre, while corn grain yields less than half this amount per acre.
Speeding Up the Breakdown
Zymetis is not the only company with a patent-pending technology to produce cellulosic ethanol, but Hutcheson believes his company has a distinct advantage over the competition. “Because the bacteria are so inexpensive to grow and are so prolific in the amount of enzymes it produces,” Hutcheson says, “we can produce a larger diversity of enzymes for less money than competitors.” EthazymeTM is also more powerful at degrading the cell walls of plant matter than other technologies and can break the material down into fermentable sugars in one step.
Hutcheson wants to go even further to maximize the efficiency of the process and is working with Dr. Jonathan Dinman, Associate Professor of Cell Biology and Molecular Genetics, to engineer a yeast strain with expanded capabilities. Currently, 1/3 of the sugars found in cellulosic biomass can not be fermented by yeast into ethanol. The newly engineered yeast will be able to ferment 90% of the sugars found in these materials.
Turning Trash Into Fuel
Hutcheson could be producing ethanol within a year with a minimum investment in infrastructure. He is working with a Virginia based company called FIberight to recover cellulosic materials from waste streams not currently being recycled.
This strategic partnership gives Zymetis access to technology which is used to extract cellulose from waste products otherwise destined for the landfill. Fiberight had been turning it into blown-in insulation for the once booming housing market. Using a series of washers, Fiberight can extract and concentrate the cellulose so that it’s ready to be converted into ethanol. Together, Fiberight CEO Craig Stewart Paul and Zymetis CEO Steve Hutcheson are moving ahead with plans to open an ethanol processing facility in Baltimore next year with institutional funds from another company.
