June '06 Newsletter

If you have filled your gas tank lately, then you probably do not need much convincing that a more affordable alternative to fossil fuels would be a good thing. Throw in issues like national security, climate change, increasing demand, and decreasing supply, and the case for a radically new global energy supply seems like a no-brainer.

What takes brains—lots of them—is figuring out just what to do about it. That is where a new project being spearheaded by at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory comes in. Called Helios after the Greek sun god, this ambitious, multidisciplinary endeavor is looking to the sun to help replace our current dependence on carbon-producing fossil fuels. Research initiatives focus on harvesting the sun's energy directly through improved solar panels and indirectly through the conversion of plants and other forms of biomass into fuel.

"At the Berkeley lab we are very strong in biology and also in nanoscience. This goes for the UC Berkeley campus as well. Well, can we harness the technologies we have developed in those areas to put sunlight, carbon dioxide, and water to use to make transportation fuels — something we can really use to replace the transportation fuels that are now in use in the U.S.?" asked Jay Keasling, Professor of Chemical Engineering and Bioengineering at UC Berkeley and Division Director for Physical Biosciences at LBNL, during his presentation at CITRIS's Corporate Sponsor Day ( http://www.citris-uc.org/CSD-2006) in May. The answer, he believes, is yes.

Keasling, Helios’s co-director alongside Laboratory Associate Director Paul Alivisatos, is one of several prominent scientists from UC Berkley and LBNL who have joined forces to pioneer sustainable, scalable energy sources under the project. These scientists are inspired, in large part, out of alarm over global climate change, says Graham Fleming, Deputy Lab Director at LBNL and Melvin Calvin Distinguished Professor of Chemistry at UC Berkeley.

“I think that people are genuinely concerned about the consequences of continuing on the current trajectory the planet is on, with respect to generation of energy, and are genuinely alarmed by the timescale on which really serious consequences might arise. So I think there's certainly a strong feeling it is a crucial problem for scientists to address. I also think there is a strong feeling that we really do not have this instant the tools to solve the problem, and we need fundamental science well connected with technology to put in place the kinds of solutions that will enable sustainable growth in the world,” says Fleming, whose own research is focused on the principals of photosynthesis.

Among Helios's more far-reaching visions are 40-cents-per-gallon gas made entirely from carbon-neutral biomass; fields of self-fertilizing plants destined to become fuel; colonies of green algae and cyanobacteria bio-engineered to produce fuels at higher efficiency; self-regulating and self-repairing organic solar panels; and nature-inspired synthetic catalysts that would convert sunlight directly into fuel. (More detailed explanations of these ideas can be found at LBNL's energy research Web site (http://www.lbl.gov/pbd/energy/research.html .)

If the scientific leaps needed to arrive at such goals were not challenging enough, all of Helios's solutions must also be scalable. "We need cheap, large-scale solutions. We need solutions that affect the whole world, especially poorer areas," Fleming says.

Unfortunately, we are not there yet. Take solar panels. A great way to generate electricity, but also extremely costly and not very rugged, making them impractical for much of the world. And what happens when the sun is not shining? There is currently no easy way to store or transport that energy. Likewise, corn can be turned into clean-burning ethanol, but getting it to where it needs to be consumed causes so much pollution and requires so much energy that it is hardly worth the effort. Further, ethanol cannot be transported long distances.

Hence, Helios's emphasis on finding more efficient ways of converting plants to fuel, which not only can be stored and transported but also can be adopted by the entire planet. "One thing we do on a scale which is appropriate to the scale of the problem is agriculture. We do it on a global scale. We have infrastructure that allows us to do it on this scale and so this seems to me an important thing," Fleming says.

While agriculture certainly holds promise, Helios's project manager, Elaine Chandler, says that at this early stage they are going down a number of different research pathways. "One of the pitfalls we wanted to avoid is down-selecting too soon and throwing out very promising approaches, just because we are ignorant about them. It is a strategic decision to do it initially this way. As we get more knowledgeable, we will focus our efforts in ways that are clearly more promising," Chandler says.

Fleming says the Helios approach is similar to the invention of the transistor at Bell Labs. "It took 12 years to get to the first transistor. They worked on very many fundamental things, solid state physics theory of all aspects of electronic structure, and people could do anything they thought was important. But the overall structure was pushing things in the direction of the end goal," he says.

To reach that end goal, Helios will need scientists with expertise in synthetic biology, nanomaterials, electrochemistry, and other fields to work closely together. This emphasis interdisciplinary collaboration caused Jay Keasling to compare the Helios research model to that of CITRIS.

"We have set in place and in motion the idea that we are going to do this research in a completely new way, much as CITRIS does its research here. So we are going to be learning a lot from CITRIS and the infrastructure you have built here in how to organize this research effort," Keasling said in his presentation.

"CITRIS is interested in harvesting the best of breed technologies from Helios as well as other novel energy generation projects under way, and developing societal scale energy systems in concert with our corporate sponsors and other stakeholders," says CITRIS Director Sastry.

Adds Chandler, "CITRIS is very interested in looking at the interface between technology and man, and I think there is no [area] that it is more of an issue than energy today."

For more information:

Future Energy Sources: A Berkeley Lab research initiative
http://www.lbl.gov/pbd/energy/research.html

Jay Keasling's presentation at CITRIS's Corporate Sponsor Day

Today, 85 percent of the energy consumed worldwide is produced by the combustion of fossil fuels. The resulting air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions are putting human health and the planet's climate at risk; yet alternative energy solutions are still years if not decades away from being viable. For the time being, the challenge of cleaner burning of fossile fuels falls to combustion science.

"It is up to us to clean up, and I think we can do it," says Michael Frenklach, a UC Berkeley mechanical engineering professor who specializes in combustion chemistry.

Frenklach believes that simply by changing the way they work together, combustion scientists can come up with better predictive models. Engineers are using these computer-based models to help them figure out what engine and combustor designs will be the most efficient and least polluting before building costly prototypes. Legislators, who rely on good predictive models as they draft environmental regulations, also stand to benefit.

To facilitate this process, Frenklach and colleagues launched a new initiative called Process Informatics Mode (PrIMe) in April.

At the heart of the project is a database of measurements and calculations, which will be contributed to and agreed upon by the scientists themselves. Typically, scientists analyze their own data and draw conclusions that are then shared with other scientists at conferences and through publications. The PrIMe Model asks scientists to contribute primary data and details of their experiments to the PrIMe database. In return, they can use the database's arsenal of novel tools and methods to analyze that same data. Instead of working in isolation, the scientists will be working with the rest of the community generating data and knowledge. This process will reduce redundancies in the types of projects being pursued and resolves conflicts before they begin, while enabling scientists to work on more challenging problems and to identify areas of shared concern. In short, it is a huge shift from the way predictive models are currently built.

"Scientists today do not share data; they share conclusions. We call it among ourselves the 'read my paper' approach. You have a question? Read my paper," says Frenklach.

While this model may have worked when combustion science was in its early discovery period, Frenklach says it is simply not robust enough to analyze today's complex combustive systems, which involve hundreds and even thousands of chemical-reaction steps and variables.

"A single researcher can measure something, analyze something, or focus on some particular aspect of it, but not everything. So in order to make a better model, you have to take all the information, not just yours but other people's as well," Frenklach says.

Like the model it hopes to create, PrIMe is a collaborative endeavor. Frenklach is joined by Andrew Packard, professor of mechanical engineering at UC Berkeley, as well as Professors David Golden and Tom Bowman at Stanford and Professors William Green and Gregory McRae at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Working groups that will subject incoming data to the rigors of peer-review are currently being formed. Participation in the project is open to anyone.

In fact, combustion science was one of the first fields to bring together many different disciplines under one roof. In an effort to understand and improve everything from automobiles and furnaces to weapons systems, physicists, chemists, engineers, and others found themselves rubbing shoulders for the first time. Over the past century they have accumulated a huge body of knowledge. It is a tradition that Frenklach is hoping PrIMe will build upon. The information and technology are all "there." The challenge, he says is sociological: Will scientists abandon the "Lone Ranger" approach in order to tackle bigger problems en masse?

PrIMe allows researchers to upload primary data to the database and use tools on the site for data analysis, while making the data available to other users worldwide.

"It is a chicken and egg problem. We cannot build this thing without the community joining us, and the community cannot benefit without us building it," says Frenklach.

The NSF's Chemistry Division, which kicked off the program with a grant ($2.6 million over five years)—one of four awarded in November 2005 for "cyber-enabled chemistry"—is betting scientists will get on board. CITRIS, in the meantime, is providing PrIMe with technology and programming support for its database.

PrIMe's emphasis on information technology is just one reason CITRIS has made it a pilot program. Another is the potential benefits to society, as breakthroughs in the field are translated into better technology that in turn will reduce the environmental damage caused by our current means of energy production. As Frenklach puts it: "We are not just solving an abstract problem here. People who build engines and combustors, practical things, they need this information very badly."

For more information:

Process Informatics Model (PrIMe) Web site