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Berkeley’s bid to become the biofuel research capital of academic and corporate America scored another major advance Tuesday, winning funds to start a second lab. 

U.S. Secretary of Energy Samuel Bodman awarded $125 million to a coalition headed by the University of California’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) to create one of three national bioenergy research centers. 

Funds will target development of genetically modified plants and microbes to transform cellulose—the basic building block of plant walls—into fuels. 

The ultimate goal is to create energy independence, with the nation reaping its harvest of crops grown on American soil. 

While the project is separate from the $500 million Energy Biosciences Institute (EBI) funded earlier this year by BP (the company once called British Petroleum), the newly funded Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) features many of the same scientific players—and both are headed by Jay Keasling, a chemical engineering professor and entrepreneur. 

The announcement was met by criticism from some researchers. “It is very disconcerting to see such an overwhelming concentration of research in the hands of scientists whose ideas are not only wrong but dangerous,” said Ignacio Chapela, a UC Berkeley plant microbial ecologist and a leading critic of the increasing ties between the corporate and academic worlds. 

Washington announcement 

Bodman made the formal announcement to reporters gathered at the National Press Club. LBNL’s Keasling stood alongside the Bush Administration cabinet officer as one of three winning project directors. 

All three centers will focus on genetic engineering as a way to create new crops along with new microbes and newly discovered enzymes to design a more efficient process for converting plants into fuels for cars, trucks and airplanes. 

Keasling say he hoped that the Joint BioEnergy Institute—or JBEI, “jay-bay as we call it”—would trigger the start of a new wave of green biotechnological industry in the Bay Area and across the country. 

The Berkeley scientist will lead a partnership headed by his lab in partnership with the Berkeley-affiliated Sandia and Lawrence Livermore national laboratories along with UC’s Berkeley and Davis campuses and Stanford University. 

While Bodman said he was barred from saying just how many applications he had received for the three slots, applicants were narrowed to a list numbering “in the teens,” with the winners picked by an international panel of scientists, technologists and figures from the corporate and non-profit realms. 

The Bioenergy Science Center is the name for the winning project for a lab to be led by Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. Other partners are Georgia Institute of Technology; University of Georgia, Athens; University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and the DOE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo. 

The third winner, the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center, is headed by the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Other partners are: the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash.; University of Florida, Gainesville; Illinois State University, Normal; Iowa State University, Ames, and the only corporate partner among the winners, Lucigen Corporation of MIddleton, Wis. 

Each lab will receive up to $25 million annually for five years. 

“We don’t know exactly what will happen, but I’ve got great confidence,” said Bodman, that the intellectual prowess of the researchers “will lead to great things.” 

The result, he said, will be “a total change in the way we power our homes and our vehicles.” 

GMO linkage 

To make the linkage between the grants and genetics research explicit, DOE Under Secretary for Science Raymond Orbach told reporters that “seven years ago to this day,” the National Institutes of Health and the DOE announced sequencing of the human genome. 

“That gave us the technological expertise to bring genomics” into the search for new sources of biofuels, Orbach said, and his department “is using genomics to meet this critical need of this nation and our world.” 

Martin Keller of the Oak Ridge center said one of the goals of their research would be manipulating the genes in cellulose to make the tissue more degradable. “We really want to change how biofuels are made in the next five years,” he said. 

Timothy Donahue, director of the Wisconsin project, said researchers had been handed “the largest political, economic and scientific challenge of our time,” with his team located in the heart of the nation’s greatest source of biomass, the Great Lakes Basin. 

Donahue said his team “will have the lead in the way” wood chips and grasses are used to produce biofuels by harvesting microbial and chemical technologies.  

Keasling said JBEI will focus on: 

• Developing new “feedstock” (plants) to provide richer sources of biofuels; 

• Scavenging the environment for enzymes better capable of breaking down plant materials into sugars, the basic fermentation stock used in making fuels; 

• Developing organisms capable of producing higher levels of ethanol as well as “the next generation of biofuels” for uses ranging from diesels to jets, and  

• Developing and refining so-called “cross-cutting technologies,” processes that cut across the different phases and specialties involved in biofuel research and production with a goal of providing techniques for the emerging biofuel industry. 

Keasling said JBEI “will operate much like a start-up company with dynamic allocation of resources” to respond to developments as they arise. 

Chapela was far less optimistic. “I no longer hesitate to use the word fascism,” he said. “That is the idea that we have no difference between the state, the scientific establishment and the corporations. They have finally come into complete alignment, leaving no opportunity for diversity of thought and creativity.” 

Both EBI and JBEI were enthusiastically backed by local government, including Berkeley’s Mayor Tom Bates, as well as by UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau. The JBEI proposal was aided by the San Francisco East Bay Economic Development Alliance for Business, a quiet but powerful alliance of corporations and local politicians. 

Chapela had been denied tenure after his outspoken critique of the Novartis agreement, an earlier UC Berkeley/corporate pact, and won his position only after filing a lawsuit. 

Starting next month, he will be gone from the Berkeley campus for a year, taking a sabattical with the Institute of Gene Ecology in Promso, Norway. “I will not lose track of what’s happening here,” he said. “I will remain engaged.” 

Geo-petro-politics 

One reporter asked the Energy Secretary about that morning’s announcement that ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips had broken off talks with the Venezuelan oil ministry over demands that the U.S.-based firms grant a majority share of revenues to the government. 

“It’s not a happy thing for Venezuela,” said Bodman, adding that American companies also have problems with Nigeria and Russia. 

He said the administration has “encouraged all countries with indigenous supplies to have laws that will encourage non-indigenous companies to participate in developing their resources.” 

Unmentioned was the fact that two companies with strong local ties—EBI-funder BP and Richmond refinery owner ChevronTexaco—have signed agreement with the Venezuelan ministry. 

A non-UC center 

While the largest share of the local biofuel funding pie has been sliced off for the UC labs, there’s another DOE recipient in Albany. 

Two other grants announced earlier this month went to research at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Western Research Center in Albany. 

Both projects were awarded $600,000 to study the genetics of grasses being considered as possible sources for biofuels derived from cellulose. 

One involves the creation of genetically modified varieties of a variety called Purple False Brome, while the second will provide a more detailed investigation of the genes of switchgrass. 

One project already underway in the lab is involved in a search for biofuel producing enzymes which can be engineered to create more efficient microbes for biofuel production.  

Two other Albany projects are aimed at using wheat as a source of biofuel, using the starches to produce ethanol, while another is looking at a whole range of biofuel issues through the lens of genomics. 

Another Albany project is concerned not with fuel but with finding new ways to engineer crops for domestic production of natural rubber.