46 Power Biofuels

no sugar rush
Rothamsted research centre

The success of biofuels depends on creating

a non-food feedstock that produces the right
sugar for conversion into fuel. However, as
Tony James discovers, you cant rush nature.
The debate has raged long
and hard about the effects that
the growing demand for biofuel
crops has had on the world food
supply. A report from the World
Bank in 2008 attributed the vast
share of the increase in global
food prices to the large increase
in biofuel production. Claims
have regularly been met with
counter claims in the media, but

the fact remains that the

increasing use of biofuels is
putting pressure on scarce
resources particularly land.
The basic feedstocks for the
production of first-generation
biofuels are products that would
normally enter the animal or
human food-chain such as seeds,
or grains such as wheat. These
crops yield starch that is

fermented into bioethanol.

The drive is therefore on to
develop second- and third-generation biofuels. Secondgeneration present the shortterm solution, and are made up
of biofuels derived from
feedstock outside the food chain.
These include waste biomass
stalks of wheat and corn as
well as special energy crops
such as Miscanthus and fastgrowing trees. The downside is
that it is difficult to extract the
cellulose from the feedstock.
Third-generation biofuels are
algae-based.
In the UK the Biotechnology
and Biological Sciences Research

Council (BBSRC) has established

the Sustainable Energy Centre, a
virtual organisation comprising
of the Universities of Cambridge,
Dundee, York, Nottingham and
the Rothamsted Research Centre.
These institutions collaborate to
carry out a variety of research to
speed up the adoption of secondgeneration biofuels along the
biofuels supply chain, including
cell-wall sugars and lignin, lignocellulosic conversion, bacterial
biofuels and enzyme discovery.
But at the head of the supply
chain is the research carried out
at Rothamsted, where Dr Angela
Karp and her team are looking
at the initial crop and how to

Engineering & Technology 20 February - 5 March 2010 www.theiet.org/magazine

Features_46_C2201R291.indd 46

12/2/10 12:34:54

47
Fast-growing trees
and grasses such as
Miscanthus store
large quantities of
the kinds of sugar
that can be converted
into fuel but they
store the sugars in a
complex way that
makes extraction
difficult

optimise sustainable biomass

yield by genetic improvement of
plants to increase the amount of
sunlight captured, the amount
of carbon a plant can assimilate
over a growing season and the
partitioning of the carbon in
harvested biomass.
Currently biofuels are made
from crops that store sugars or
starches and then it is a very
simple process to convert that
because crops quite nicely store
the simple form of sugar, Karp
says. All you have to do is extract
it and ferment it much like you
would to make alcohol and in
this case we use the alcohol for
fuel instead of drinking.
The problem with that is the
same crops that store sugars and
starches are food crops, and in
order to produce that amount of
sugar they require a lot of
inputs, particularly fertilisers.
These inputs are energy-intensive and as a consequence when
you add up the entire lifecycle
and look at the amount of
energy you need to grow the
system and produce the sugars
into fuels, compared to what you
actually get out of the system,
the balance isnt particularly
favourable.
The research is focused on
developing a crop that is not
used for food and also which is a
perennial. Getting a perennial
crop is important because not
having to cultivate it each year
means that the soil can maintain
its carbon sequestration. The
crop would also replenish its
own nutrient supply; at the end

of a cycle it would drop its

leaves, returning the nutrient
goes back to the system.
This means that the amount
of fertilisers or external inputs
in the system is a fraction of
what is needed for food crops
the bulk of which are annuals
and have to be grown from seed
every year, Karp adds. When
you add all that up and look at
the lifecycle analysis the total
energy inputs in and what you
get out its several fold better
that you would get extracting
fuel out of a food crop.
The crops that are the centre
of attention are fast-growing
woody trees such as Willow and
also grasses like Miscanthus,
often called Elephant Grass.
The thing that these crops have
going for them is that they
produce large amounts of
material with very [few] inputs;
they grow astonishingly fast
they produce a huge amount of
biomass from a small area which
is exactly what we need, Karp
explains.

LIGNOCELLULOSE
EXTRACTION

The difficulty is that the sugars

that need to be converted into fuel
are not stored in a simple way.
They are locked up in structure of
the plant itself, in the cell walls as
lignocellulose. There is a very
good supply of it, but
lignocellulose stores the sugars as
cellulose fibres interwoven with
other polymers that are there in
order to supply strength to the
plant. There are polymers of

lignin knotted together with the

cellulose in a very intricate and
tightly locked pattern.
To release the sugars out of
that mesh, that network, is difficult because you have to allow
access for the enzymes which
are involved in the fermentation
process they cant get into the
network, Karp explains. So
what you need to do is somehow
either improve the structure of
the cell walls so that it is easier
for the enzymes to get in which
means trying to select plants
whose composition is amenable
to breakdown by the enzymes
or there has to be work done on
the microbial process where the
microbes are used to break the
cell wall down.
Because there is a huge
amount of diversity among the
plants the team are working on
naturally selecting plants that
can fit the bill, but Dr Karp does
not rule out the use of genetic
modification.
The legality of genetically
modified produce depends on
where you are in the world; here
in Europe it is not allowed
without very strict regulations,
she adds. However in the case
of non-food crops, such as
energy crops, there is so much
natural diversity that people are
using that for now. There may
well be a time when some
specific changes such as
engineering the cell wall could
profit from transformation, and
we certainly use genetic modification as a tool in order to see
whether we have the right gene

Physical pre-treatment,
chemicals and enzymes
Fuel-producing
microorganisms

Solar energy

Biofuels

Feedstock
The conversion of biofuels
into usable energy has yet
to prove its efficacy

Sugars

and whether the changes that we

are trying to introduce by
breeding are the right changes.
There is a huge amount of
diversity as these are not highly
domesticated crops, and we have
a lot to play around with before
we need to think about the GM
route, but on the other hand it
would be silly not to develop a
GM route because in the longterm future who knows that
could become more acceptable
and there might be specific
conditions around it.

NEW BREEDS

Developing new breeds of plant

is not a quick process, they have
to be developed and then let to
grow for a full season, so the
timeline of the research is not
short term. We have a massive
amount of Willow growing so we
can really look at the crop in
terms of what a farmer could get
out of his field, which is very
important, Karp says. That is
underpinned by work in the
laboratory all the way through
to bioinformatics. It is a very
integrated approach through
from genes and biochemistry in
the lab, right through to
performance in the field.
It is expected to be between 10
and 20 years until the research
delivers advanced varieties of
crop into the market, although
they hope to have improved on
the current crops before then
with varieties that Dr Karp calls
sub-optimal.
It is likely that although the
research at Rothamsted is at the
head of the supply chain it will
lag behind research carried out
by the other teams. In terms of
the chemistry that could move
much faster because it is a
question of working with
micros and enzymes where you
dont have the time-lag of having
to grow things out and see how
they perform, Karp agrees.
If biofuels are going be a viable
and sustainable replacement for
fossil-based fuels the work of
Dr Karp and her colleagues
around the globe needs to
deliver a feedstock that can tick
all the boxes, and although
research the work of nature
cannot be rushed, the clock is
ticking for biofuels to deliver.

www.theiet.org/magazine 20 February - 5 March 2010 Engineering & Technology

Features_46_C2201R291.indd 47

12/2/10 12:34:46