Transcriber: Amina IKLI Reviewer: Elisabeth Buffard
Thank you
I'm so thrilled to be here
and I've thoroughly enjoyed today.
So thank you for the invitation
and I invite you just to listen, for just a minute
-- actually few seconds ---
[the sounds of energy]
So what did you hear?
You probably heard some of the man-made sounds
I'm sure you recognized, the cars starting,
perhaps a fan blowing...
but did you catch the insects?
The sounds of the insects? You did! The buzzing and..
Usually the ones that bite us, right, we're familiar with that.
But we have a voricious appetite for energy
and I don't need to stand up here and tell you that.
And it's only expected to increase.
But what I'd like you to consider
is the fact that we are surrounded
by natural forms of energy.
And actually right now,
if you were to stop and count them,
there are about ten quintillion
individual little natural biorefineries on the planet,
and you probably know them as insects.
And so the ten quintillion comes from
if you were to distinct about how many are alive on the planet right now,
those were the estimates that you come up with.
And so what I'd like you to think about even further,
and what's more astounding to me even,
is that for each one of those quintillion
associated with it is at least one
and sometimes more
than a hundered different types of micro-organisms.
So if you think about what that number would look like
I didn't even bother to put it up there,
just cover the screen in zeros!
So you may be thinking, what do these microbes do?
what do the microorganisms do?
Well, in the case of the bean bug,
it actually is the microorganisms inside the animal
that allow it to become pesticide-resistant,
that allow it to evade our means of trying to get rid of this pest.
And in the case of the digger wasp shown here
in the cocoon form,
the insect has to stay in this life form for several months.
And it cultivates bacteria to live on the surface.
And those bacteria produce antibiotics that protect the animal.
And a third interaction with insects and microorganisms
is what Tod alluded to and
that's the microorganisms that actually help
the animal produce the energy that it needs.
And so that's what I wanted to talk to you a little bit about,
is what are some of the lessons that we can learn from
how nature transforms energy,
and how might we take some of the lessons that we learn
and help us advance our industrial processes even further.
So I want to just give you an example of cellulosic ethanol,
just as one type of industry.
Most of us have heard about Ethanol,
most of us have heard the term cellulosic, or lignocellulosic.
And I don't have time to go into a lot of detail here.
But if you think about the step one there,
that is the collection and the harvesting of your materials.
Of course, you have to do that
in an environmentally-aware, sustainable manner,
so just give us that role on that same page there.
So your process might be to plant a crop like we do with trees,
we farm trees here,
or it might be that you use the leftover residue of another process.
And so if you look at step number two,
then you might envision taking one of those logs
and shoving it into the reactor.
And you could do that, they are that big,
but really you have to reduce the particle size,
So you have to have some chopping or some shredding.
And then usually there is a bit of heat that's applied,
and some chemistry that allows
the opening up of that fibrous material
so that then the enzimes will come in
and they actually start to deconstruct the long chains of carbohydrates.
And then the microorganisms can actually take their sugars
and produce the product, and in this case, the product is ethanol.
But it could be bioethanol, it could be biojet fuel,
it could be lactic acid for bioplastics,
it could be any one of a number of products
because microorganisms are really resourceful
in the kinds of things they produce.
Ok. So you may be thinking,
Hmm, haven't I heard this before?
So what's different about this?
So in fact the idea of using bio-based materials
to make a product or a commodity chemical
started really with the model T,
it was designed to run on ethanol, not on petroleum.
And when petroleum became available and it was really cheap,
then we transitioned away from a bio-based economy
to a more petroleum-based economy.
And then if you look down at just below that,
I have a lovely picture of our environment,
and that's to remind me that in the '60s,
we started becoming very painfully aware
of what our industrial processes were doing actually to the planet.
And a number of laws were enacted that caused us
to perhaps be more conscious of our stewardship
of our natural resources.
And then up in the corner you'll see the sign that says,
"Sorry, no gas"
And if you were around at that time,
this was around the '70s and early '80s,
where we had that OPEC oil embargo and we had the oil crisis,
where gas stations actually ran out of gasoline,
they just didn't have any fuel.
And so there was quite a bit of chaos that ensued,
and throughout these periods in history, we've said,
well, let's look for alternatives to petroleum,
let's look for an alternative energy source.
And then, when the OPEC stops yanking our chain
or when something happens and petroleum becomes cheap again,
we kind of abandon that.
So what I'd like to share with you is the idea that,
perhaps for the first time in our history,
a number of very powerful drivers
political, environmental, and economic,
have aligned themselves to kind of shove us away from petroleum.
And so if you think about the first political driver:
this is the secretary of the Navy.
And I just like to paraphrase something that he was saying
at this Clean Energy conference.
And he said: "It makes great strategic sense
to move away from fossil fuels.
It's costly
For every increase of a dollar in a barrel of oil,
it costs the US Navy 31 million dollars.
And it's costly not just in terms of money.
For every 50 convoys of gasoline we bring in,
we lose a marine, killed or wounded,
and that's too high a price to pay.
So we're finally starting to acknowledge
some of the politics in some of the strife around
our dependence on petroleum.
And it's a matter of environmental impact.
And now I go... I need to stop too and say
I don't believe that cellulosic ethanol is a silver bullet.
I don't believe there is one answer.
We need several backshots,
we need everything that we can do,
but everything has a consequence.
And if you gonna really go deep down in the earth
and start really trying to recover the resources,
you're going to have an impact on the environment.
And if you think about economic reality,
then the investments over the last
-- I think that graph starts in 1995
and is estimated to go to 2020 --
the investments in the renewable energy space
has really started to explode.
So one of the messages that I'd like to convey to you
is that we are in this transition now!
That it's happening now.
That people are making investments
because of these drivers aligning themselves today.
So let's get back to some of the lessons
that we are learning from nature.
So I introduced you to the termite earlier,
most of them, you've seen before.
But this particular insect is called Tipula Abdominalis.
And it's otherwise known as the crane fly.
And it looks like a giant mosquito
that's about to suck you dry by your blood,
but it won't do that.
And if you look at it for a second,
you can tell it's not a mosquito
because it can barely control the way it's flying,
it's very ungraceful.
So I'm here to beg for mercy,
please, don't squash it.
As it only exists to find a mate and lay eggs and then it dies.
And what we study is the larval stage shown here of this insect.
And the larvae are very important in stream ecosystems
because their major processes of leaf litter that falls into the steams.
And so if you take a look at the larvae and the drawing
just underneath the picture of the larvae,
is actually an outline of its gut system.
And that only does the animal decrease the particle size
and the material is collected and harvested in the streams,
but if you look at number 2,
my industrial process up there,
the animal actually provides some chemistry
that perhaps we hadn't realized before.
So in the animal's mid section and its mid gut,
the PH is very alkaline.
And some of the toxic kind of coumpounds
that come in with the biomass,
they are actually removed and that's kind of detoxified.
And if you do this on an industrial scale --
there're processes where you raise the PH up very high
and you drop it back down --
that actually makes everything downstream work better.
That material's less toxic to the organisms, it's less toxic
to the enzymes and your yields are increased.
And I'll talk a little bit more about that later.
So if you take a look inside the animal, inside the hindgut,
you'll find it's just chockful of microorganisms.
And some of the discoveries that we've made in this system
have to do with new kinds of enzymes that have different activities
that hadn't been seen before in industry.
And so if you can apply some of these new enzymes
in that industrial process there, may be they'll go faster,
or may be your yields will be higher.
We also found some new sources of antibiotic compounds inside this system.
And as you might imagine, it's very crowded in there.
And if you can produce something exhibited by the plate on the slide,
that can keep your competitors labeled one, two and three at bay,
then that would give you an advantage.
And so while this particular example is not a new antibiotic,
it's a new source of antibiotics.
And finally, we've discovered some completely new organisms.
This particular one has a new cell wall type.
It has a new way of dividing.
And chances are really good that if you look into a system
that's not well studied,,
you're going to find something no one has seen before.
So I'd like to maybe finish up by just giving you a couple of examples
of some applications of what we've learned from our insect teachers.
And this is a picture up in the top corner,
you'll see a picture of yeast.
And many of us are familiar with sacchromyces yeasts,
they're used in baking bread,
they're used in brewing beer and making wine,
and they're used in corn ethanol.
And so we took this industrial strain,
and we asked it to ferment pretreated Southern yellow pine.
And so what happened was what you see at the bottom
of the graph in the green line.
It didn't do very well.
So we learned some lessons from how the insect is able
to detoxifiy this material.
And what we did is we evolved a yeast that's now able
to ferment this material to match higher yields,
and as you might imagine,
that this process is greatly enhanced economically,
you actually now have enough product
that you can recover it and you can distill it.
And this is with material that's not washed and
hasn't been cleaned up in any way.
And the next example that I'd like to share with you
is the application of some of those novel enzymes.
And if you look at the bottom panel, that is a picture of the bacteria
fermenting of sugar beet pulp
that's left over from syprups or table sugar processing.
So you got this waste stream that now has a lot of sugar,
and if you try to ferment that with those yeasts that I told about,
you don't produce very much ethanol.
So you need another organism that's able to handle
all of the different sugars in that particular biomass.
And then we were able to increase the yield further
by adding some of those novel enzyme activity.
So now the organism can take that little short chains of the sugars
and it can actually secrete some of the enzymes
that are needed to help break apart the plant material.
So how quickly can we translate research findings into
industrially-relevant processes?
Well I'm here to tell you, very happy to say that it's happening now.
The research from our labs, from labs all over the world,
industrial labs are really pushing this field forward.
And so our new challenge now is how do we educate
a technically-skilled workforce to staff this new exploding industry?
And so what you're looking at is a photograph
of a professional science masters in biomanufacturing and bioprocessing program
that we've launched.
And a number of these are popping up,
they're a handful in the US.
But we work with industry to say,
Ok, you're moving at the speed of business.
And in academia, we don't usually quite move that quickly.
But we need to be responsive to your needs
for people who can work in this industry.
And these industries will be located in rural areas
because that's where the biomass is.
So we also need training programs at the...
maybe less sophisticated skill level and we can put people back to work.
And so we also have worked with our school systems
to try and maintain some of the energy about sciences --
I think everybody saw Britney's talk and we're just astounded
at some of the creative potential that we have out there --
but she shared with me
that her sixth grade teacher pulled her aside and told her
to speak to her talents and to not be cowed by the fact
that she's smart and she's good at math.
And we need to keep singing that song to our children and to our students
and especially our young women.
And so we have this little travelling road show
that was developed by my collegue at their Doctor Anna Carls,
where we actually take the insects out into those school systems, the termites,
and the students actually dissect them out and they get to see the microbes inside.
And then you can see in one of the pictures
a little boy that daddy's kind of look in there, like,
what you are so excited about? What you're looking at?
And so through the children, we educate the parents.
And then we have some interactive displays
and we start talking about cellulosic fuels.
And so we kind of get at them and in round.
And so my message or my challenge is that this transitional way
from a petroleum-based economy is coming.
And if you saw that graph and really grasp what that meant,
this is really a transformation in the world's energy infrastructure,
this is happening all over the world, not just here.
And if you can look at what you have in your community
and in your region and in your area,
if it's a waste or if it's something you can grow and harvest
in a sustainable manner and you can collect it,
and then you can make a fuel,
then it makes sense.
It makes full circle sense.
And so I challenge you to continue to educate youself.
Don't believe all the myths that are out there
about alternative energy,
don't throw out all of biofuels
because there are issues with corn ethanol
or whatever you produce.
There are issues with everything.
And if we don't start really looking at petroleum and fossil fuels,
with the same scrutiny and the same magnifying lens
as we do with any kind of alternative, then we're going to be in trouble.
So that's my challenge to you and I thank you.
(Applause)
Thank you so much