Michael Crowley: It's an interesting position to be in where
you're dealing with something that is so fundamental, of a physics and chemistry level that will
have, in the long run, an impact on how you get from New York to Chicago.
You know, will the airplane ride you're taking continue to produce the greenhouse effect,
or is it having no effect, because we've been able to understand the physics at the molecular
level?
Our understanding will help to then change the way we go about this, to be more efficient,
and to, in the long run, produce a better product for our society
William Smith: We're going to have to blend, we're going
to have to mix, we're going to have to bring other feedstocks into the mix.
How we learn how to handle these here with the challenges, say that occur in a corn stover,
is going to inform how we're going to deal with the challenges that are going to come
in as segregated municipal solids and wastes that are gonna come in with a great deal more
variability.
Everything we learn here is not just applicable to corn stover.
It really is applicable to all of the emerging feedstocks and all of the potential feedstocks
that could ever come online.
Richard Skaggs: How are we gonna operate a waste-to-energy
facility to fully exploit the resources that are available?
And tailoring the ultimate blend to what you have available at a given location makes each
one of these opportunities a very site-specific problem.
And that's exactly how we've designed the Biomass Assessment Tool, to address these
kinds of issues.
Lynn Wendt: We're not just solving problems that are out
there right now.
We are using everything that we're learning to make this advanced pre-processing system.
And it starts now
Peter Ciesielski: Part of the reason why we have such a big
modelling effort into understanding these impacts is so that we can predict based on
the feedstock variability what was the big harvest that year -- that's going to dictate
what your feedstock was.
Also, economic factors: what's the cheapest thing?
What's the cheapest blend you can make?
And so you can't run a whole suite of experiments at the industrial scale every year to understand
what the optimal operating parameters are.
John McGowen: You have to make that investment in being
able to give time, give resources, to be able to set those experiments up, execute well
on those experiments, be able to chase the failures - there's interesting stuff there,
be able to get stuff into the lab, outside, test it quickly.
All those things are really key, and we're here to be able to do that.
Kim Ogden: That thing about algae, is it works for food
and for fuel, right?
And this whole energy-food-water nexus is very important.
It's gonna be a problem.
We need protein, we need carbohydrate, we need lipid, so that in the future, we can,
you know, solve some of these problems we're gonna have as we get to 9 billion people.
Richard Hallen: Sometimes we may not be innovating, in that
it's something totally new, or whatever.
But it's... but it's taking that and applying it to a different area.
As an example, the petrochemical industry has solved a lot of problems, so there's some
things we don't need to reinvent.
Daniel Anderson: You need quite a bit of leeway to innovate
and solve these problems.
We quickly move small-scale experiments into continuous processing so that we can encounter
the problems and they'll be even magnified when they're at the smaller scale.
But that's okay because we can at least learn from those and then we know when we go to
scale, what kind of scaling issues we have and what scales are going to be the most appropriate.
Heather Job: If... if we are not, as scientists, paying
attention, to that small, little, tiny peak in our analysis, going, "what is that?", then
that's when we're going to miss those really great discoveries.
Babetta Marrone: So, I think a lot of the innovation that we
have in the future is really going to be in terms of what is going to not just maybe replace
the petroleum sources of those same chemicals and materials, but may also lead to, you know,
some perhaps entirely new chemicals and materials that would be able to contribute in some really
unique ways to the bioeconomy, some entirely new products that we just have not found before.
Sarah Arrowsmith: I think, if we look back on this, and it's
20 years from now and we've made some really great breakthroughs, that I can say I that
I was a part of that, and I contributed to that.
Sarah Kempkes: I agree, I also...
I love learning new things.
Every day I come in here I learn something new.
All the new procedures and analysis that we do here - it's really exciting.
Kevin Kephart: To me, innovation simply comes down to continuous
improvement.
We continuously improve the products that we develop, we listen to what consumers need
and want, but also how we use that knowledge to improve our environment.
Help to watch out for, and live up to our obligation to secure a good future for future
generations.