Dr. Larry Walker - The Switch Interview

- You don't believe that oil is gonna disappear in the next 15-20 years, do you? - [Interviewer] There's quite a bit of oil around. - Okay, I don't believe that's gonna happen. So what we're looking at is whether we're gonna have a mixed portfolio of transportation fuels. Why are we concerned about that? Roughly 70% of the petroleum coming into this country is going into the transportation sector. So, the issue is how do we maintain our transportation infrastructure, our transportation system, with renewable fuels? - Sure. - The big question is are we looking at displacing 15% of the oil used for transportation? Are we looking at displacing 25-30? We can set projections, but if you begin to look at what we have to do nationally and globally to meet liquid fuels need, we need to be looking at a broad spectrum of plant-based resources. With sugarcane, its a straightforward technology. You extract the sugars and you ferment the sugars. With corn, it's a little bit more complicated. You have to extract the starch, hydrolyze the starch into the sugar, and ferment the sugar. In both cases, you're looking at fermenting basically one sugar, which is basically glucose. When we look at something like, say, cellulosic materials, like a perennial grass, like a switchgrass, reed canary grass, we're looking at two polymers that we're trying to break down. We're trying to break down the cellulose, which is a polymer of glucose, and we're trying to break down the hemicellulose, which is a polymer of a five carbon sugar, primarily xylose, but there are other five carbon sugars. - What is cellulose? - So, cellulose is one of the principal structural materials in plants. It's the material that gives plants its strength, allows plants to stand up. - [Interviewer] Okay. - So plant cell wall is composed of about 35-40% cellulose, about 30-35% hemicellulose, and another polymer, mixed polymer called lignin. - [Interviewer] Okay. - So, these are the building blocks of plant materials. They allow grasses to grow up nice, tall and straight, okay? It gives it structure. So if it gives structure, it gives recalcitrant. It's not easy to bring down. - Right. - When I look at a field of grasses or trees, I think wow, we've got 70% sugar in this biomass that we have there. The challenge, though, is how do you liberate those sugars in a very cost effective way? I'm trying to produce a fuel to go into cars for something around $1.50 to $2.00 per gallon. We've gotta learn how to do the conversion more effectively. We've got to learn how to move the materials very effectively. So, if you think about it, I harvest, say switchgrass in the fall over a four week period. But if I build a bio-refinery, I've got to run that bio-refinery 350 days a year, seven days a week, 24 hours. - Yeah, yeah. - So I have to have an infrastructure in place. I have to business plans in place to make sure I can deliver this material 350 days a year, to a bio-refinery to do the conversion. So you got the logistical side of that. One of our beliefs is that research and development can help us address some of the challenges to producing biofuels from cellulosic material. There's a big debate on the sustainability of different crops for biofuels. Using the cellulosic materials that we're looking at require less nitrogen fertilizer. Nitrogen is a major source of natural gas usage, because you use nitrogen gas to produce nitrogen fertilizer. So that's one aspect. You begin to look at water usage for some of these grasses versus a crop like corn. So there are a number of factors that we play off when we look at these feed stocks. - [Interviewer] Why don't I just have a bunch of sugarcane up here, in New York? - Well, we don't have the right climate for sugarcane, or a sweet sorghum, okay? - Okay, - But, again, we grow trees quite well here in the northeast. We grow cellulosic grasses very well in the northeast. - [Interviewer] Okay. - So, again, you're looking at regional ecosystems. Many of these grasses that we're looking at, like switchgrass, just keep in mind that switchgrass is just one of a number of perennial grasses that we can grow in agriculture across the country. And so, why not look at different possibilities? - [Interviewer] Okay. - And why shouldn't we just look at feedstock that they can develop within their ecosystem? - [Interviewer] Okay, absolutely. - And so, we're a very big believer that there's a regional dimension to biofuels, bioenergy production. - [Interviewer] You bet. You grow what you have, where you have it. - That's right, exactly. And then you begin to adapt the logistical system, and that's the system from moving the material from the field into the conversion system based on regional structure, topology of the land, the infrastructure you have for transportation. You begin to tap into the science and technology that we have within specific regions. You take a state like New York. In the years that I've been here in New York, which is about 30 years, we've seen a lot of land come out of agriculture production. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.5 to two million acres of land that's come out of production. Can we-- - [Interviewer] Why does that happen? - Because changes in the dairy industry, competition, global competition. Remember, we're now shipping apples and apple concentrate from China to the US. - [Interviewer] To the US, okay. - We're shipping dairy products across the country. So, when we look at agriculture in the US it's a very competitive market. It's responding to markets just like other industries. And so we've lost this land from productive activities here. And so, to what extent can we, in the northeast end, on why this abandoned land, as in the northeast, play a role by diverting some of that land to biofuels and bio products. - So what you're describing can really have a very positive impact on the rural areas of the US. - That is an interest here in New York. How do we generate jobs from rural communities? If you go around New York, you go around parts of Michigan. Across the country, rural communities are struggling. And so this is one of the opportunities to bring economic developments to rural communities. - [Interviewer] How do we get there? How do we go from, sorta, the lab to commercialization? - Oh, a lot of key factors there, you know. Part of that is actually getting out there and doing some of this. Building pilot plants, eventually building full scale facilities because as an engineer you know that we learn a lot from ramping up a process. - [Interviewer] Absolutely. - Okay, it's one thing for me to say I can do great things here in the laboratory with my reactors. - [Interviewer] I'm going from this, to that. - Exactly. But it's another issue to really scale this up and to hundreds of thousands of gallons. Millions of gallons. - Yes. - And there is a learning curve for actually doing. Whether we're talking about the conversion work, or whether we're talking about the feed stocks. So how do we get on that curve? Policy. What kind of enlightened policy are we gonna have in place to help encourage or discourage options? Policy is gonna play a major role. We've got a big debate going on in Washington about indirect land use and how that's gonna play out biofuels, okay? So it's not just research and develop, market. When we were looking at oil at $150-160 per barrel, a lot of interest in renewable. What has happened this year? You go back 30 years, 30 years ago we did not have, we had the same situation. - [Interviewer] Yeah. - We had high prices for a while. - Different driver. - Different drivers. - [Interviewer] Prices were up. - Prices were up and then what happens when the prices drop? - [Interviewer] People forget. - We lost the national will to stay with our energy plant. - [Interviewer] Little bit different there from today, today the demand is pulling so hard globally. And it's tough for me to envision. I was learning how to drive back then. It's tough for me to envision that demand going away, for energy. - Well, again, if we go back 30 years ago, this is in our history, China was not a major player on the energy front. - [Interviewer