'Q': The greenest letter in alphabet?
By Nick Grabbe
Staff Writer
Published on February 22, 2008
Tom Warnick was hiking near the Quabbin Reservoir when he scooped up a small patch of soil that some believe could lead the world to an abundant and clean alternative to gasoline.
Warnick, a lab technician in the microbiology department at the University of Massachusetts, collected lots of soil samples when he went hiking. He'd spoon them into baby-food jars, take them back to the lab, and put them in test tubes to measure how well they converted ground-up paper into ethanol.
The microbes in the soil sample he collected on that Quabbin hike did a very good job of it. Now SunEthanol, the company that arose out of the department's research on the "Q microbe," is attracting money and national attention because of its potential to break the world's dependence on unstable oil-producing regions.
"Sometimes I feel like a proud daddy," Warnick said.
At SunEthanol's lab on University Drive in Amherst, the Q microbe mixes it up with ground-up cornstalks and leaves in one-liter reactors. Technicians adjust the temperature, the acidity, even the speed of stirring, to find the combination that maximizes the ethanol yield, said Jef Sharp, the company's CEO.
The microbe has a wide-ranging appetite. It can perform its magic with switchgrass, which is native to the Midwest; with paper sludge, which gets put in landfills; and with sugarcane leftovers, Sharp said. Brazil is now energy-independent because of ethanol derived from sugarcane, he said.
Move over oil
"This has the potential to displace the use of oil in this country," Sharp said. "It has the advantage of supporting farm communities and reducing CO2 emissions. It could allow developing countries to produce their own energy."
The energy bill that Congress passed in December includes a mandate for 21 billion gallons of renewable fuel not derived from corn by 2022. Sharp and Susan Leschine, a UMass microbiology professor who researched the microbe for six years, testified before Congress about what SunEthanol may be able to do, and both parties support the research, he said.
"To get there we need to move fast," Sharp said. "Without accelerated technology and infrastructure and incentives to build plants, it's not likely to happen that quickly."
SunEthanol is sharing in a $30 million Department of Energy grant. Its partners include a large designer of ethanol plants in Missouri, a company specializing in raw materials dedicated to biofuels, and the National Renewable Energy Lab.
SunEthanol has also received $3.7 million in venture capital, including a major investment from VeraSun, one of North America's largest makers of corn-based ethanol. So far, no one is producing ethanol from plant waste, and the field is wide open. SunEthanol believes its microbe makes it possible to produce the fuel more economically, Sharp said. The company does not plan to produce ethanol but to license its technology, he said. If the business takes off, UMass will benefit along with the company.
Because the company was based on research conducted on campus, UMass holds the patent to the Q microbe, and SunEthanol has the exclusive license to commercialize it, Sharp said. So UMass will receive royalties from the sale of any ethanol that's sold. The company also sponsors additional research at UMass, he said. SunEthanol is a model for the kind of faculty spin-off business that Amherst has been trying to attract for more than 20 years. Town Manager Larry Shaffer, who wants to broaden the town's tax base, is negotiating a deal that could create a research and development park for UMass-related businesses in North Amherst.
One of the investors in SunEthanol is Long River Ventures, whose managing partner is Tripp Peake of Amherst, a longtime venture capitalist in the area. He said the market for ethanol will boom over the next five to 10 years and praised SunEthanol's "platform technology."
"I liked the way this was a business that was an enabling technology in this industry and was not trying to build an ethanol company," Peake said.
SunEthanol has doubled the performance of the Q microbe since opening last year, moving from test tubes to one-liter reactors, Sharp said. The next steps are 20 liters, 50 liters, 500 liters, and then a 2 million-gallon pilot plant it would like to develop next year, he said.
"We can't be reliant on the Middle East for our energy needs," Sharp said. "It's a dangerous and vulnerable place for the country to be."
And it all came about because a member of Leschine's team at UMass picked up some dirt on a hike.
"Here's this scientist who travels the world looking for interesting microbes, and then in her own backyard she finds this microbe that could really change the transportation fuel future of the world," Sharp said.
