Good morning everyone I am Allison
Goss Eng with the Bioenergy Technologies
Office here at DOE. So bioenergy has
been around as long as humans have. Two
and a half million years ago when man
discovered fire he quickly realized that
his fire only lasted as long as he had
wood to fuel it. In the mid seventeen
hundreds to 1800 we were using whale oil.
We were taking the blubber from whales
and boiling it in big pots in order to light
streets around the Western world. At one
point whaling was the fifth largest
industry in the United States. We
slaughtered 8,000 wales in one year to
harvest their oil. It was used to light
homes as well as to produce bio products
like hoop skirts and lubricants and
chemicals. But as populations grew and
people became more affluent and wales
became more and more scarce we had to
rely upon other sources of energy. Fossil
fuels. So the two primary kinds of fossil
fuels are coal which is trees and ferns
have been buried under sedimentary rock
exposed to intense heat and pressure for
millions of years. As well as oil. Simply
organisms that are little simpler. Algae,
bacteria, phytoplankton, zooplankton that
are buried underground for
millions of years. So when the these
fossil fuels are extracted from the
ground they take in or create quite a
bit of greenhouse gas emissions. So over
time we have been extracting our energy
sources from the ground and as we have to go
deeper and deeper it gets more
complicated and therefore more expensive
to access energy. The implications
to us of
all this greenhouse gas emissions
going into the atmosphere of course
climate climate change,
extreme weather events, intense flooding
and the creation of a new concept of
climate refugees, communities that have
been displaced because of this this
climate change caused
by fossil fuel use. But within the
Bioenergy Technologies Office we have an
idea to move away again from old carbon
to fresh carbon once again. So to use
plants and animals to produce the fuels
that we need to power our transportation
sector. So the greenhouse gas emissions
associated with transportation are
fairly significant. In the U.S. we use
about two-thirds of all of our oil to
power transportation.
Trains, planes, automobiles,
trucks and and so forth. But we and also
about thirty percent of that greenhouse
gas emissions within the U.S. is
coming from from the transportation
sector. We have lots of options for power
and heat as it relates to renewables.
Solar and wind and geothermal. But for
liquid transportation fuels that that
fit with our existing infrastructure
biofuels is really the primary
option for us. So within the Bioenergy
Technologies Office we're really trying
to develop new technologies and
innovations to make these biofuels more
cost-competitive to really
usher in a new a new era of fresh
carbon utilization for our energy. So
what's the future going to
look like? Algae is a great option for
for bioenergy production. Algae have the
potential to be incredibly productive to
double within hours and to be harvested
daily. Certain algae species have the
potential to produce thousands of
gallons of jet fuel or diesel per
acre per year. Much much more productive
than
any of our current crops that we that we
rely upon. We're really interested in
crops like this as well as dedicated
energy crops that aren't going to compete
with our existing land base. Land that's
currently being used for other
sources. Algae is a great option and also
is waste so trees, dead trees that are
in the forest that create a higher risk
for forest fires as well as what you
see here stalks and leaves that are left
over after a corn harvest. A great
potential bioenergy feedstock. Dupont
took advantage of some technology that
the Bioenergy Technologies Office
supported in the development of a new
biorefinery recently. They opened the
largest cellulosic ethanol biorefinery
in the world and are reliant upon this
technology that the Bioenergy
Technologies Office had a hand
in creating. This facility at its full
operation can produce up to 30 million
gallons of ethanol each year and really
represents a partnership within its
local community with farmers to collect
store as well as deliver that
biomass to this facility. The aviation
sector is also really interested in
getting into the biofuels game.
Recently Virgin Atlantic partnered with
with LanzaTech and agreed to
use some of the aviation fuel that LanzaTech
was producing from industrial waste
gases like carbon monoxide coming out of
of steel production. So this
technology that LanzaTech developed was
done in partnership with Pacific
Northwest National Laboratory and really
presents a unique opportunity for the
aviation sector to reduce their
greenhouse gas emissions associated with
with the flights that they take and also
provides a creative solution to
industrial waste management. So really a
win-win.
All of this investment in technology and
and growing the bioeconomy creates a
tremendous number of jobs. Jobs in
agriculture, construction, engineering,
of course science research and development,
marketing and as well as financing. One
recent study pointed out that by
2030 we could have increased our number
of jobs supporting the bioeconomy by
fivefold and could have over a million
people at working in this
sector here in the United States. So
within the Bioenergy Technologies
Office we really have had this vision
of an energy future that is again
relying upon fresh fresh new carbon. We
want to develop innovations and
technologies that are going to support
making biofuels available, affordable as
well as sustainable. We know then in the
future you are not just going to be
moving around your vacations and on your
commute using fossil fuels. Increasingly
you're going to be relying more and more
on renewable technologies. Those Amazon
cardboard boxes of bioproduct by the way
that end up on your doorstep every day
we'll hopefully end up there through
trucks and planes that are powered
by bioenergy. Pay close attention because
changes are coming to airports and
to gas stations near you.
The decisions that you make at the pump
as well as in the products that you
purchase many of which are going to be
relying more and more on on biomass and
bioenergy can have a huge difference in
growing the U.S. economy as well as in
mitigating climate change. So thank you.