Q microbe spells energy potential

If nothing else, the enigmatically named "Q microbe" is a voracious eater.

It can chomp its way through wood pulp, sugar cane, switchgrass, corn waste and most other types of plant matter, efficiently turning what it consumes into ethyl alcohol and a smaller amount of acetate.

This might not be important to most people if it were not for the fact that ethyl alcohol is also known as ethanol.

With an increasing need globally for an energy source that can replace fossil fuels, a lot of eyes - and microscopes - are focused on this tiny organism dug out of the soils around Quabbin Reservoir in the early 1990s.

Susan B. Leschine, a microbiologist at University of Massachusetts in Amherst, had been looking for microbes with interesting abilities for decades. She would go on vacation to places like Hawaii and come home with a tan and a soil sample full of microbes.

However, the Q microbe - as she and her team of researchers named it - was found, essentially, in her own back yard, harvested by a graduate student, Thomas A. Warnick, of Sunderland, who was working in her research lab. The microbe was put into storage, and it was not until three years ago that its unique talents were fully recognized.

"At first all we knew about this microbe was that it had a voracious appetite for plant material. It broke down more of the components of it than anything else we looked at. But we didn't recognize immediately that if you grow it in the right way it made higher amounts of ethanol," Leschine said.

Eventually, they played with the growing conditions.

"As an experiment, we put it into a test tube and shoved in as much paper as we could. When it converted a very high percentage of that paper into ethanol, we realized we had something novel," she said.

If there is a search for the holy grail in the biofuels industry, it is the effort to find a process that significantly cheapens that cost of turning a range of plants, from grass to tree bark, into ethanol. That's why the interest in the Q microbe is so keen.

The hope is that it can eventually reduce the cost to create the fuel by 20 to 30 percent, and a company, SunEthanol, has been spun off from University of Massachusetts to commercialize the development, with Leschine as its senior advisor. Patents on the technology related to the Q microbe have been applied for by Leschine, Warnick and the university.

This year, nearly 6 billion gallons of ethanol, almost all of it derived from corn, will be produced in the United States, more a than five-fold increase from a decade earlier. The U.S. Department of Energy hopes ethanol can eventually replace a third to half the nation's use of gasoline.

However, the rising demand for ethanol has meant a rising price for the corn to make it. In early 2006, farmers were being paid $2 for a bushel of corn. Currently, the price is nearly $4.50 per bushel. That has driven up the price of a range of corn-based foods, from tortillas to popcorn. But the high price has also convinced many farmers to plant corn instead of other crops, such as soybeans or wheat, and that is affecting the price and availability of still other foods.

The high food prices and the increasing diversion of corn to make ethanol - less than 5 percent went to ethanol a decade ago in the United States while nearly a quarter of the crop will this year - is worrying people who worry about feeding the poor. This year, the United States, the largest supplier of food to the world's poor, was able to buy less than half the amount of food aid that it did in 2000.

"We have to move towards a viable bio-based fuel economy. But I think we all know that you can't get from here to there with corn," said Franz A. Matzner, a forest and public lands advocate for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

"You can get biofuels right, and you can get biofuels wrong. We can get it right if we do it in a thoughtful way. But we have to have a clear direction in this to avoid what could be pretty cataclysmic side effects," he said.

Ethanol is not the only biofuel on the market, though. A relatively plentiful restaurant product, vegetable oil, can also be used in vehicles that run on diesel, and that fact has not been lost of several local entrepreneurs.

In Easthampton, Greasecar Vegetable Fuel Systems may be the nation's largest producer of retrofit kits that will turn diesel-burning vehicles into ones that can burn 100 percent vegetable oil. The kits typically cost $800 to $1,200 for do-it-yourselfers. The company will install the equipment for an additional $600.

Once the system is installed, it's up to the vehicle owner to find the vegetable oil (although Vegetable Fuel Systems does sell it in bulk). However, some restaurants are happy to oblige. By law, they are unable to flush the waste into sewers or dump it in landfills, so most pay contractors to haul it away.

"There's no shortage of waste oil. There's billions of gallons produced every year," said the company's owner Justin J. Carven.

He calls the company "a niche business driven more by the cost of fuel at the pumps than by the hyper-excitement around green fuels."

In Greenfield, Co-op Power is building a $5.8 million biodiesel plant in the town's industrial park that will take train carloads from around the Northeast of previously used oils, including vegetable oil, as well as yellow grease, a product from rendering plants. The plant will turn the mix into 5 million gallons of fuel each year, useful not only to run vehicles but also as an additive to heating oil. It's expected to open early in 2008.

Wood is also a biofuel, and in Russell, on the banks of the Westfield River, Russell Biomass LLC is seeking to build a $150 million, 50-megawatt wood-burning power plant.

It has gained approval from the state so far in the permitting process, but it has been opposed by some Western Massachusetts residents, who say the plant would add particle matter to the air in the Pioneer Valley. State environmental agencies have disagreed, saying the plant would not degrade air quality further. The facility would produce electricity that would be fed into the regional power grid.

Nevertheless, because of its ability to power everything from cars to power plants, ethanol has the potential to offset the most fossil fuel in the long run. Similar to fermenting hops to make beer, ethanol is derived from plant material whose starches are broken down into sugars that are fermented to make ethyl alcohol. What made corn such an attractive crop for ethanol makers is that there was a lot of it and it was a relatively simple and therefore inexpensive process to convert it to a usable fuel.

Converting most other plant materials to ethanol, such as wood pulp, switch grass (a thick grass common to western prairies) or corn stalks, is more costly because it is more difficult to break down the cellulose of these often tough plants into the sugars that can be fermented.

However, everything depends on finding a way, said Leschine. "There are a lot of challenges, though. The biggest one is to make the process of converting this plant material economical."

Sensing an environmental need and a financial opportunity, researchers across the country are intensely trying to develop not only more efficient processes to convert plants to ethanol, as Leschine is, but also more suitable plants as feedstock for that conversion.

Gene manipulation is a technique that may rapidly impove potential biofuel plants. And University of Massachusetts biologist Magdalena Bezanilla was recently awarded a $625,000 grant to try to find genes in moss that, when transferred to biofuel plants, will enhance their growth or ethanol output.

However, whatever plant is used for biofuel, it will have to be converted to a ethanol. And what makes the Q microbe of particular interest to the biofuels industry is its ability to perform two of the three steps needed to convert plant matter to ethanol. The first step is to break down the starches in the cellulose of plants - the fiber - into sugars that can be fermented. Chemicals produced by organisms, called enzymes, perform this function. The second step is to ferment the resulting sugars. The third step is to separate the ethanol from the water and other products of the fermentation.

The Q microbe produces enzymes to break down the cellulose and it also ferments the mix. Other fermenting microbes don't do both. And the enzymes needed to get the plant material into a fermentable state are expensive, said Jef Sharp, the chief executive officer of SunEthanol, which is based in Amherst.

"The enzyme step requires significant capital expenditures, many millions of dollars. This technology could eliminate the need for that spending," he said.

The company, which currently employs about 12 people, recently signed partnership agreements valued in the millions of dollars with companies in the ethanol or energy business, including VeraSun, one of the largest ethanol producers in the country. SunEthanol hopes to build a demonstration ethanol conversion facility within two years that can show the capabilities of the Q microbe.

"We now need to figure out the conditions it needs for industrial scale production. It works at this scale, in a laboratory in a flask and tests tubes. Now we need to scale it up," Leschine said.

Should the company's process work on a larger scale, it would benefit energy poor nations, said Sharp. Unlike some other microbes used to produce ethanol, the Q microbe seems to work with any plant material.

"It is really appropriate to be used around the world. That is a huge benefit for developing countries that have an agricultural zone that is fertile and rich, but that have no oil. Now they have the capability to grow their own energy," he said.