Yes.
I’m a biochemist.
I, I did my thesis work working on bacteria, and then I switched to, to plants.
Um, bio- the biochemistry of plants.
And I’ve worked on topics such as: how do plants make lipids and how do plants make
cellulose.
So, the kinds of materials that are actually used to make biofuels, my, I spent my career
working on the basic mechanisms of how those things are made by plants.
Um, I got interested in the, in the field, I switched to plants specifically in the 70s
when I was a student because I was very concerned about the sustainability of our modern societies.
And, that was the era in which people like Paul Ehrlich were talking about, um, the population
bomb.
And, so my wife and I, my wife is also a professor at Berkeley, we decided that we needed to
start, um, trying to apply science to making at least part of our material and food needs
more sustainable.
And so we’ve spent our time, uh, most of our scientific careers working on trying to
improve our ability to manipulate plants, uh, for, for both agriculture and fuel uses.
And I’ve published about 230 papers in the field.
Yes.
The Energy Biosciences Institute at Berkeley was founded by, uh, in response to a, um,
a solicitation by the big energy company BP for an institute that would focus on trying
to understand how energy could be, or sorry, how, how modern biology could be applied to
the energy sector.
And it was a very, kind of bo- bold idea.
They were looking around for technical innovation, and to make a long story short, when I was
still a professor at Stanford, I, I got involved with a person named Steve Chu at, uh, UC Berkeley,
and Steve went on to become the Secretary of Energy of the United States.
Um, and we, um, had decided that Berkeley had a lot of capability in renewable energy,
and that we should try to get this, um, this new center that BP was offering to fund with
500 million dollars.
So, we, we wrote a proposal, it was successful, and then Berkeley recruited me away from Stanford
to go and lead that center.
And now the center has about, um, all together about 500 people.
It was 127 professors and, um, uh, about, um, 380 graduate students and post docs.
And we have a, it’s not just at Berkeley, it’s at Berkeley and, uh, the University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign because Berkeley’s not a very big agricultural school, and we
wanted to have a, a footprint out in the agricultural region of the country.
And at that institute, we’re taking a holistic view of bioenergy.
So we, we do economics, and environmental science, and ecology, and mechanical engineering,
chemical engineering, chemistry, biochemistry, microbiology, and, uh, law and policy, and
agronomy.
All wrapped up into one coherent whole, to try and understand how to advance, uh, well,
how to implement advanced, uh, biofuels.
Uh, we don’t work at all on, um, sugar cane or corn ethanol or biodiesel.
Partially, mostly because those are already relatively mature.
So we’re really focused on next generation fuels.
Well there’s, I think, I, what I try and convey in my talk is that I, I think in the,
in most aspects of bioenergy there’s a lot of opportunity for innovation.
There’s still, there’s still many aspects of the process where we don’t even know
what the optimal route forward is, or too, what’s, what’s ultimately going to be,
I assume, a mature technology.
So, um, I think there’s lots of interesting opportunities to get involved with testing
new ideas and trying to move them towards commercialization.
My experience has been there’s quite a bit of venture capital still available for different
components, uh, of the, of the sector.
I, myself, um, have started, uh, three companies.
Two of which were in the bioenergy space.
Um, and are, two, are both thriving.
So I, um, I, I think that’s a really exciting opportunity.
And it’s something that requires innovation and, you know, new i- new thinking.
And so, um, I think that’s something that small, small, ah, companies are really well
qualified to do.
And then eventually I expect, um, the large energy companies will, ul, ultimately come
to dominate the sort of the, the very last step of the process.
That is, you know, the large scale production, but that they will be large consumers of,
of interesting technology.
I got into the field really because, um, I was very concerned about climate change.
So, when I was a professor at Stanford, actually, Paul Ehrlich, the father of conservation biology,
was one of my colleagues in the department of biological sciences.
And, ah, Stanford also is a very strong ecology school.
And my colleagues in ecology in particular, really convinced me that the consequences
of climate change were, were serious and something that we really should try to, to bring every
possible, um, technology to bear on.
So, so, I started.
That’s how I became involved with Steve Chu, um, and I was, ah, for some years an
advisor to the department of energy, to the director of the department of energy as well.
And I got, in that process, I got somewhat educated about sort of, what the challenges
were, and s- gradually turned my own research towards, towards trying to adjust that challenge.
And I, I believe now that, actually, you know, it is very challenging, but long term, I do
think that we can introduce a basket of technologies that will allow us to, to evolve towards a
low carbon, um, energy system that will still allow us to maintain, uh, a good standard
of living around the world, and, um.
So, I think it’s, I, actually, think it’s really the great problem of this generation
is, is how we’re going to address the energy problem, you know, the energy and climate
problem, shall we say.
And, um, I see many ways to do it.
Not just in bioenergy.
At Berkeley, we have an integrated energy group we call the Berkeley, uh, energy and
climate initiative that, that, in which we’ve now got, I, I would estimate fifteen hundred
to two thousand scientists working across the whole space.
So, some of us are working on biofuels.
Many are working on energy efficiency.
Many are working on solar and smart grid and, um, ge- and, geological sequestration.
And in general I think that that’s the, the big opportunity now, is to, is to look
at everything we can possibly do, and, uh, bring as much creativity as we can to the
sector.
And, and I think, you know, within the next 50 years, we’ll be able to gradually change
the society to, to a low carbon society.
And I think it’s very important to understand it is a, you know, a fifty year or beyond
kind of initiative.
That we can’t expect, uh, short term, um, you know, changes.
And in fact, I think one of our biggest challenges is that the popular press, which is ver- you
know, has, plays an important role in understanding the problem, uh, has a very short kind of,
uh, um, eh, interest, um, they, or they assume people have a short interest.
And so, they’re always looking for, you know, the short term solution.
But actually, we’re engaged in something that requires a long term commitment.
And so, I hope, my, one of my big hopes is that the popular press will also get involved
in, sort of, in keeping people’s, uh, interest and enthusiasm up as we make incremental change
towards a long term solution.
Yes, ah, well, I, I think, for me it would be biofuels.
Because right now, it’s the one that we do know how to produce and it, it, I believe
it can be done sustainably, and, and it actually can be done locally and, um, it’s how we
used to produce most of our energy.
You know, it wasn’t that long ago that, uh, that actually we got pretty much all our
energy from wood.
And, uh, and in fact, uh, there’s a funny saying that, um, in the United States, let’s
see, at the turn of, uh, of the, uh, at the end of the 1900s, no at the en- the end of
the 1800s, so in 1900, a third of the land in the United States roughly was used to make
transportation fuel.
And, of course, in that day, it was growing oats for the horses that provided pretty much
all transportation.
And so, so I actually see the bioenergy sort of initiative as leading us back towards,
uh, a sustainable, sort of a sustainable thing.
And, um, so we, we knew how to do it, and we’re gonna relearn.
Of course now our energy demand has increased very strongly, so we need to be a lot better
at it than we were in 1900.
Well, we’ve sort of seen that occasionally, right?
There’ve been some pretty big, um, blackouts in which, um, you know, the power was down
for substantial periods of time.
In fact, when I was a professor at Stanford, the power went down here for four days, um,
uh, due to some sort of, due to a storm that blew through and put down a lot of power lines.
And so, uh, I remember it as being a very very frustrating period of time, because I
couldn’t do my email.
[Laughs] So, uh, yeah.
So I think, um, obviously, it’s unpleasant to, to live without, without, uh, power.
And hopefully we won’t have too many future instances of it.
Now, I’m not all sure what else to say about that.
[laughs]