$125 million bioenergy initiative powered by Midwest ag industry, MSU research

“These centers will provide the transformational science needed for bioenergy breakthroughs to advance President Bush’s goal of making cellulosic ethanol cost competitive with gasoline by 2012 and assist in reducing America’s gasoline consumption by 20 percent in 10 years,” said Secretary of Energy Samuel W. Bodman.

“The collaborations of academic, corporate and national laboratory researchers represented by these centers are truly impressive, and I am very encouraged by the potential they hold for advancing America’s energy security.”

Research at the DOE GLBRC will be done by a dream team of scientists from Wisconsin; Michigan State; Lucigen, a Madison-area biotechnology company; the Pacific Northwest and Oak Ridge National Laboratories; and the University of Florida, among others.

The research focus: breeding new varieties of bioenergy plants, developing new processing techniques and agents from microbes for breaking down cellulose, improving the microbial and chemical processes that convert biomass to energy products, providing an environmental and economic framework for sustaining the biomass-to-fuel pipeline and integrating new technologies –including genomics and new computational methods – into bioenergy research.

Keegstra’s expertise is in plant cell wall biology – a crucial area in making biofuels. He has extensive management and scientific experience, having served for 14 years as director of the DOE-funded Plant Research Laboratory at MSU and as faculty member in the botany department at UW-Madison for 15 years.

He said the two universities' complementary expertise – from agriculture sciences to microbiology to chemical engineering – combined with knowledge from the rest of the partners forms a team designed for progress and action.

“If we're going to start using plants in significant ways beyond food, there are a lot of issues that come into play that we need to figure out,” Keegstra said. “Sustainability, competition for food, environmental issues – our universities already have a head start in studying these from many angles. There is tremendous compatibility between UW-Madison and MSU, and we have assembled with others a strong and dynamic partnership.”