Biofuels Digest Newsmaker: Ethanol guru Dr. Bruce Dale

May 15, 2008

Professor Bruce Dale is Professor of Chemical Engineering and former Chair of the Department of Chemical Engineering at Michigan State University. In 1996 he won the Charles D. Scott Award for contributions to the use of biotechnology to produce fuels, chemical and other industrial products from renewable plant resources. Dr. Dale has authored over 90 referred journal papers, is an active industry consultant and expert witness, and holds thirteen U. S. and foreign patents. He joined Biofuels Digest by telephone today for a Newsmaker interview.

Digest: With the food vs. fuel debate, what do you see as positive and what is negative? Is there a potential to throw out the baby with the bathwater, as cellulosic ethanol gets mixed up with corn ethanol in a “ban biofuels” movement?

Dale: There’s a potential to throw out the baby with the bath water but I think cooler heads will prevail. Not to run down corn or sugar I heard a prominent person at NRDC drew a distinction between cellulosic and first generation. Ten minutes later a GM guy said the same thing.

What’s distressing is the failure of the media, and society as a whole. The never draw comparisons. It’s not like we have a perfect fuel. Gasoline is what we have. It’s ethanol, made at this time from grain, or gasoline. We are in a real pickle and we need alternatives.

Shopping for a car I wouldn’t say I am going to buy a Lexus no matter what. I would make choices and comparisons. That’s not happening with the debate.

On the positive side, I think that biofuels are robust enough that they can take the criticism.

Digest: In the base of misleading coverage of biofuels, do you see it as a product of the fact that most people haven’t been exposed to the complexities of agriculture, trade, environment and business - so we have a learning curve - or are there more sinister forces at work?

Dale: There are all kinds of motivations , of people. There are some powerful interests that want to strangle biofuels in their infancy, so some coverage isn’t honest, can’t be. A lot of this is Future Shock, it takes a while to become educated on the technology and not many journalists are educated in science or engineering. They are intelligent but it will take time.

It turns out that Timothy Searchinger - who is affiliated with Princeton - is a lawyer and not a scientist. He was with the environmental defense fund. It’s remarkable that no one took a few minutes to Google him to find out his background. I don’t know him, but it’s not a study that would have passed muster among the people I know who analyze life cycle impacts. It doesn’t meet the standards to be published.

With respect to direct land use effects, clearly if you plough up an acre of CRP land, then an impact analysis has to be done and should be. But to speculate about the impact of market forces a half a world away, it is really weak and dangerous.

Let me give you an example. If our friends in the automotive industry put more electric hybrids on the road, it would use more nickel from mines in Kenya. The Searchinger analysis says that the electric car’s impact has to be measured in terms of any negative impact that comes from a rise in nickel demand and nickel prices, anywhere in the world where this has a consequence.

It’s unethical and we don’t have the data. We are so far away from being able to do that analysis.

Digest: E85 has not received the support many had hoped for it. The public seems to have understood very easily that ethanol has 30 percent less BTUs than gasoline, but they haven’t as easily understood the positive potential from ethanol’s higher octane levels. Is that why E85 is lagging?

Dale: I am aware of the arguments over E85’s loss of mileage. The auto industry can design or tune engines to take more advantage of ethanol’s higher octane, but they have bigger fish to fry and they don’t get into that.

Digest: What do you see as the biuggest challenge for cellulosic ethanol. The high production cost?

Dale: Speaking as a chemical engineer, and in terms of process engineering, I am confident that we will get the costs down on cellulosic ethanol production, and that it will happen more quickly than people think. There is more than enough biomass to provide the cellulosic feedstock, there is plenty of plant material. In terms of how we are going to collect and transport thousands of tons of biomass, now is the time. The USDA should be establishing research centers on the scale of the DOE’s funding of biomass conversion into fuel. It needs to happen. The cellulosic issue will happen in the next five years.

Digest: What processes besides enzymatic cellulosic ethanol have the most promise? Pyrolysis? Gasification?

Dale: Ultimately there are a number of thermal and biological processes and our use of them will be largely determined by the properties of the feedstock. For reasons I am not going to get into here, the thermal processes are more likely for woods, especially soft woods, while the biological processes are more likely to be used with the straws and grasses.

Digest: Are new fuels going to be a major part of the picture. What about biobutanol?

Dale: I like butanol as a fuel molecule, but in the patents and papers I have read, there’s never more than a 2 percent concentration of butanol. There’s too much water, and I don’t see how they are going to solve this. But I wish them well, because it is a very good molecule.

Digest: What do you see as the biggest challenge for biofuels as a whole.

Dale: I am an optimist, but I am not particularly optimistic about our political leadership in either party. I don’t see much realism from the parties or the candidates on energy or transport issues. We need leadership on this, and the new President has to supply this. If he or she does not “get this” problem of our petroleum dependence, it will be a lot more difficult to realize our goals.

We need to keep the pressure up on our elected representatives to find honest solutions to petroleum. Let’s be grown ups, there are no perfect alternatives out there except to keep our dependence on petroleum.

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Written by Jim Lane · Filed Under Interview, Producer News, Research