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Josie Giles, School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering
Contact Josie Giles josie.giles@chbe.gatech.edu
404-385-2299
Gold Rush Rivalry
UGA and Tech Pioneer Rich Biofuel Frontiers
Atlanta (October 17, 2007) — By Josh Clark
Originally published in “The Sunday Paper"
(October 6, 2007 Issue)
The longstanding competition between the University of Georgia and Georgia Tech is well known on the gridiron. But elsewhere, beyond the hedges and out of sight of the ghost of Bobby Dodd, there exists another front to the rivalry. These opposing warriors wear lab coats instead of shoulder pads, and nary a one can throw anything approaching a tight spiral, but the division between Tech and the state’s flagship university is just as wide as ever. It can be found within the labs and facilities that make up Georgia’s rough and tumble field of biofuel research.
“I would say there is a rivalry,” says John Muzzy, a chemical and biomolecular engineering professor at Tech. “But it’s not like the football rivalry.”
That’s true. Tech has better footing in this version. When they hear alternative fuel research, average Georgians think, “Georgia Tech.” After all, it is an institute of technology. But UGA has been quietly making a name for itself in biofuel research. Still, one can’t help but get the idea that maybe Tech doesn’t really respect UGA’s research as fully as the school’s defensive line will respect Knowshon Moreno next month.
“[The two schools] are kind of going in different directions,” Muzzy says. “UGA is working on a lot of biodiesel and agricultural-type feed stocks. That’s not really Tech’s forte.”
Muzzy is quick to point out, however, that despite the rivalry between Tech and Georgia, researchers from the two schools have a good history of working together. Muzzy himself is part of a team that consists of both Tech and UGA researchers that looks like it will produce a healthy start-up company, and Muzzy says he can guess where the perfect location for the corporate offices would be.
“We will probably set it up in Gwinnett County, because it’s between Tech and Georgia,” he says.
Of course the researchers will work together: There’s a lot on the line. Money, prestige, careers—sometimes it pays to sleep with the enemy. Alternative fuel research is, after all, the prize pig in the field of scientific investigation right now.
With the oil crisis that began in the ’70s and never really went away, research into alternatives to fuels made from dinosaur goo has become highly competitive. Those who can conceive, properly market and make an end run past the oil companies with a viable alternative to conventional fuel will not only become the wealthiest people on the planet—they may be canonized as the saviors of the planet.
CONTENDERS FOR THE CROWN
There have so far been a lot of contenders for the role that oil currently occupies: hydrogen, electricity, even salt water. And for the past few decades, University of Georgia researchers have been investigating their own alternatives. Two new potential biofuels have emerged from the hallowed halls of Athens. One process, conducted by a team looking into wood as fuel, has already been shown to work. Another team is recently flush with grant money to get started.
If you find all of this exciting, just talk to a UGA bus driver. It’s old hat to them.
UGA is second in the state only to MARTA in the number of people its buses carry, and this year all 47 buses in the UGA fleet began using B20, a mixture of 80 percent diesel and 20 percent biodiesel made from the chicken fat of neighboring Gainesville’s plentiful chicken-processing plants. Twenty percent sounds like a small dent in diesel use, but it results a pretty substantial emissions reduction: a decrease of 967,000 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions annually.
If you’re impressed by that, prepare to be amazed by UGA’s research into the perfect alternative fuel. Tom Adams, director of UGA’s Faculty of Engineering Outreach Service, leads the team that came up with a bright idea: wood chips.
After experimenting with everything from recycled materials to chicken fat (he was part of the B20 bus program), Adams began looking into an already established, but overlooked, process called pyrolysis. This process was already understood to produce stinky and thought-to-be useless, oil.
“Most investigators, worldwide, avoid making or collecting this oil because of its odor and since most think of it as having little if any value,” Adams writes in an email to The Sunday Paper.
But Adams was intrigued by Tech’s study of this stinky oil using peanut hulls and water. He joined a group featuring Tech researchers and a Blakely, Ga. entrepreneur named Danny Day, and moved the project to UGA. It was there that peanut hulls were traded for pine trees.
“I became convinced that [the oil derivative] could be refined,” says Adams. “Everything our team has learned while working with this oil has encouraged us to believe that it will be able to supply us with abundant amounts of clean-burning, carbon-neutral diesel fuel.”
How does it work? The wood chips are heated in an oxygen-deprived environment. They then produce a gas that eventually condenses into a liquid, which can then be used to power an engine. Adams says that the process requires further study to determine any long-term effects the biofuel might have on an engine, but inherently it is already environmentally superior to conventional gasoline or diesel.
The beauty of the wood-chip biofuel, which Adams and his team have not yet named, is that the process uses 100 percent of its waste, meaning that it produces no carbon-dioxide emissions. If grown, harvested and processed correctly, the fuel could be carbon-neutral. The pyrolyzation of the wood chips reduces their bulk to charcoal, which can be used as fertilizer to grow more trees, which can be used as fuel, and so on.
To come up with the process, Adams took note of a technique used by indigenous farmers in South America known as char-and-burn. This method was so successful that anthropologists have recently figured out that pretty much the entire Amazon Basin is still sustained by it today—even though the farmers who practiced it haven’t been around for centuries.
Unfortunately, the exact knowledge of the technique was lost when the people who created it were overrun and killed by colonial Europeans.
“We know a key ingredient was charcoal,” he says. Since charcoal has a tendency to suck up carbon in the atmosphere when it’s embedded in the soil, “this gives us a beneficial way to extract carbon from our atmosphere and put it in the soil, where we may benefit from it while reducing carbon dioxide.”
GEORGIA THE NEW SAUDI ARABIA?
Meanwhile, back at the lab, another research group in a completely different department has been awarded $20 million to figure out a viable alternative to the nation’s “oil addiction.”
A team of researchers from UGA’s Complex Carbohydrate Center aims to find an ethanol that can compete with gasoline. By breaking down the cell walls of poplar trees and the omnipresent weed switch grass, the complex carb team hopes to extract simple sugars, which can then be used as a fuel. By using native switch grass and poplar trees, ones that grow well in Georgia, the team could make Georgia the new Saudi Arabia—without the associated apparel shift.
The thing is, this research team isn’t the first to attempt to create fuel from simple sugars. Others have tried, and some have even come up with actual functioning processes. But they ultimately proved too costly to be viable as a fuel source.
Nonetheless, the carb team has a cool $20 million to crack the code. They hope to break down the complex carbohydrates into simple sugars—this is the cool part—by using a single microorganism. This means that no mechanical process needing an energy source to power itself would be needed. It would be a truly biological process. The researchers would simply collect the remnants, say thank you to the microorganisms, and process the ethanol into fuel.
Despite all of this hard experimentation in Athens to find a better fuel, Adams doesn’t think it’s what will pay off in the long run, because both his research and the complex carbohydrate process require the harvesting and destruction of plant material, which already serves much-needed functions elsewhere in the ecosystem.
“We don’t think it is the Holy Grail of renewable fuels,” he says. “We think electric cars charged from electricity from wind resources is the Holy Grail.”
Related Link
School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering
http://www.chbe.gatech.edu
The Georgia Institute of Technology is one of the nation's premiere research universities. Ranked among U.S. News & World Report's top 10 public universities, Georgia Tech educates more than 16,000 students every year through its Colleges of Architecture, Computing, Engineering, Liberal Arts, Management and Sciences. Tech maintains a diverse campus and is among the nation's top producers of women and African-American engineers. The Institute offers research opportunities to both undergraduate and graduate students and is home to more than 100 interdisciplinary units plus the Georgia Tech Research Institute. During the 2003-2004 academic year, Georgia Tech reached $341.9 million in new research award funding.