The United States Department of Energy will invest up to $375 million over five years in three new Bioenergy Research Centers, including $125 million for a center led by the University of Wisconsin-Madison, to promote the development of cellulosic ethanol.

The Madison bioenergy research facility, which will be called the DOE Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center, will operate in collaboration with Michigan State University and be directed by Timothy Donohue, professor of bacteriology at UW-Madison.

The center, which will focus on plant-drived biomass, is part of the broader Wisconsin Bioenergy Initiative.

The state of Wisconsin will allocate $104 million for the center, including $100 million for a bioenergy building on the Madison campus and $4 for new faculty hires.

Gov. Jim Doyle compared the bioenergy research center to another research facility that is being added to the UW-Madison campus.

“This center will be the centerpiece of our state’s efforts to lead the country toward energy independence,” Doyle said in a release, “and just like the Institutes for Discovery, this will be an economic engine that will translate new discoveries into high-paying jobs.”

Cellulosic accelerators

The centers, which also will be located in Oak Ridge, Tenn. and near Berkeley, Calif., are being created to accelerate basic research in the development of cellulosic ethanol and other biofuels. They will feature multidisciplinary teams of scientists, and collaborations of academic, corporate, and national laboratory researchers.

The funding is part of President Bush’s “Twenty in Ten” initiative, which seeks to reduce U.S. gasoline consumption by 20 percent within 10 years through the development of renewable, carbon-neutral energy sources.

Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said in a release that the centers, which were chosen as part of a competitive review process, will provide the “transformational science” needed to make cellulosic ethanol cost competitive with gasoline by 2012.

Cellulosic ethanol would be made from feedstocks other than corn, and biomass material like agricultural residues, grasses, poplar trees, inedible plants, and non-edible portions of crops.

A major focus of the centers will be to re-engineer biological processes to develop more efficient methods for converting the cellulose in plant material into ethanol or other biofuels.

Madison directive

The centers, located in distinct geographic areas, will use different plants for laboratory research and for improving feedstock crops. According to the DOE’s Office of Science, the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center will conduct genomics-based research to remove bottlenecks in the biofuels pipeline, upgrade the procedures for processing plant biomass, and improve the biological and chemical processes used to convert biomass into energy.

Donohue said scientists and engineers will be working on new processes to convert plant material into ethanol and other biofuels or electricity. “We have a lot of existing technology that we can improve on and some we can modify or tweak,” he said. “In about six to 10 years down the road, there will be a whole new group of technologies that will be developed.”

One business collaborator in the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center will be Lucigen Corp. of Middleton. In 2006, Lucigen spun off another company, C5-6 Technologies, to commercialize enzymes that have been found to increase yields in the production of ethanol from corn.

David Mead, president and CEO of Lucigen, and John Biondi, president of C5-6 Technologies, said the two sister companies will basically take the same approach to collaborating with the research center that they do in the private sector. Lucigen will develop the gene cloning tools used to discover new types of enzymes from previously inaccessible sources, such as the extreme heat of hot springs, and C5-6 will screen for enzymes that break down biomass into simple sugars that can be fermented into ethanol.

The federal funding for the bioenergy research center “is a pretty exciting development,” Biondi said. “We’re thankful to be part of it with the university.”

Over the past few years, ethanol plants have sprung up all over Wisconsin and much of the Midwest as the biofuel has been touted as the solution to America’s energy woes. And so far, corn has been the undisputed king.

C5-6 Technologies of Middleton is working to change the landscape of the biofuel industry. It plans to do this with newly developed enzymes - proteins that catalyze chemical reactions - that will not only make production of corn ethanol more efficient but also expand the raw materials, or feedstocks, that can be used to create the fuel.

With five employees and $2.2 million in grants and loans, C5- 6 was spun off last August from Lucigen, the biotech firm it still shares office and lab space with at 2120 W. Greenview Drive on Middleton’s west side.

John Biondi, Lucigen’s former chief operating officer, was named president of the new company, which is named for the five and six carbon sugars formed by its enzymes.

Biondi said the enzymes will extract ethanol from parts of corn and other biomass that have to this point been commercially impossible to use in ethanol production. This will extend to cellulosic ethanol production, using materials such as switchgrass and wood chips.

But the company’s most intriguing feedstock target is a plant already very familiar to Wisconsin farmers and the biofuel industry - the soybean.

While it has never been used to produce ethanol, soybean oil has been the dominant source for biodiesel production. But C5-6 believes soybean meal, produced during soybean crushing along with the oil, will make for an excellent ethanol feedstock.

Not only will the enzymes break down the meal into ethanol, but they will create a valuable soy protein concentrate that can be used as a petroleum substitute in products such as adhesives and plastics.

“We could have a process that is by far the most profitable ethanol process out there,” Biondi said.

This new use for soybeans has received the backing of Bob Karls, executive director of the Wisconsin Soybean Association.

“This technology can help soybean farmers, make our country safer and our air cleaner with more ethanol fuel,” Karls said. “This is a win- win for consumers and farmers.”

Brett Hulsey, president of Better Environmental Solutions and a Dane County Board member, has been hired as a consultant by C5-6. He said this new technology will have a positive environmental impact. “This could dramatically increase ethanol production without requiring new acres of corn to be planted,” Hulsey said. “It’s good to have crop diversity.”

Expanding beyond corn for ethanol production is a strategy that Biondi said is necessary for the industry to be sustainable.

“We have to have multiple feedstocks in order to get to the level of biofuels production that we’re going to need in order to make a significant difference in oil consumption,” Biondi said. “We can’t do it on corn (alone). However, corn is where the industry is. Corn is the starting point. And we have to have a solid ethanol industry in order to go forward from there.”

For that reason, C5-6’s first commercial enzymes will be used in corn ethanol production. Tests of some of those enzymes were run last year at Ace Ethanol in Stanley, about 90 miles north of La Crosse. Bob Sather, chairman of Ace, said C5-6’s technology will have a far-reaching impact on the ethanol industry.

“It’s going to make (ethanol) more competitive, less costly to make and more profitable,” he said. “We’ve been improving incrementally to make the plants more efficient. But they’ve been smaller scale. This is a big leap forward.”

Sather said the increased efficiency could mean extra revenue of about $7 million per year to plants such as Ace, which is producing about 42 million gallons of corn ethanol per year.

With the company now searching for $5 million in venture capital, Biondi expects the first enzymes for corn ethanol production to begin generating revenue by 2008 and the enzymes for soybean ethanol production doing the same in about 18 months. Enzymes for producing ethanol from cellulosic materials are expected to be in the testing phase within two years, Biondi said.

“You can make ethanol out of pretty much anything,” he said. “The question is, can you make it at the right price?”

C5•6 Technologies, Inc.
2120 W. Greenview Drive
Middleton, WI 53562

Phone: 608.836.3587
Fax: 608.836.3626
www.c56technologies.com

A Middleton company that mines the hot springs of Yellowstone National Park for hardy microorganisms is spinning off part of its business.

Lucigen is creating C5•6 Technologies, a company that will devote its efforts to developing enzymes for biofuels.

John Biondi, who has been Lucigen’s chief operating officer, will become president of C5•6 and Phillip Brumm, Lucigen’s senior scientist, will be the new company’s chief scientific officer.

Lucigen, established in 1998, is a small operation with about 20 employees; creating C5•6 will turn it into two small companies.

“Lucigen is very focused on the life sciences and those customers and markets,” Biondi said. “C5•6 is very industrial. Biofuels has a very different customer base. The dynamics of it are completely different; also, the scale of it is very different.”

Lucigen has developed tools to clone genetic material. The company sells that technology, developed by its founder, David Mead, as well as E. coli cells used for drug research.

Lucigen will also proceed with research into enzymes that can be used for medical diagnostic purposes, discovered in Yellowstone’s waters.

C5•6 — named for the sugar molecules released by the company’s enzymes — will receive the exclusive licenses for those enzymes, which are expected to increase ethanol production.

The microorganisms can function in the high temperatures used to create the fuel from processed corn. They also are believed to break down more of the corn’s starches.

“We believe that we can improve the productivity of the current corn ethanol process by approximately 10 percent,” Brunn said, adding that no additional equipment is needed by corn processors.

For now, C5•6 will be housed at Lucigen’s offices and labs, 2120 Greenview Drive, Middleton. The new company already has received a $50,000 low-interest loan from the state Department of Commerce and a $45,000 grant from the Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection.

Biondi said he hopes to raise $5 million from investors to continue tests on the enzymes and bring the first products to market during the second half of 2007.

Nationwide, more than 100 ethanol plants are operating and 60 more are being developed, Biondi said.

Creating the biofuels-related company comes at a time when gasoline prices are at near-record levels, well over $3 a gallon. But Biondi said that’s not the impetus for creating C5•6. Lucigen has been involved in the research for two years, he said.

“We are certainly aware that time is of the essence,” said Biondi. But, he added, the company didn’t hurry up the process “just to catch the ethanol wave.”