OSU biofuel research receives federal funds
Friday, December 10, 2010
Oklahoma State University researchers are looking beyond the obvious and below the
surface for potential biofuel in plants, rangeland ecology professor Gail Wilson said.
Wilson and her peer Yanqi Wu, OSU professor of grass breeding and genetics, recently
were told their work in growing switchgrass and other prairie plants would receive
nearly $1 million from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s food research initiative
program. OSU’s proposal topped the list of the more than 100.
The USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service identifies biofuel as any fuel derived
from a recently living organism, usually a plant. The biomass produced from that material
is burned to generate electricity, chemically converted to gas, or processed into
liquid fuel such as ethanol and biodiesel. Wilson said switchgrass has a high yield
and biomass quality and it is highly adaptable.
As emitted carbon dioxide levels continue to rise and contribute to worldwide climate
change, the USDA has pushed for more programs to find a solution. Like many other
scientists, Wilson has been looking at carbon sequestration, or ways to reducing the
amount of carbon dioxide put into the atmosphere by locking it into geological formations
or by growing plants.
The OSU proposal is a little different, however. Most researchers in biofuel grasses
have focused on what happens with the part of the plant that grows out of the soil.
Wilson said they’re not thinking outside the box enough.
“What we look at is what happens below ground,” Wilson said. “We look at the interactions
between the roots, the soil and the microbial communities. … Our goal is to help get
carbon out of the air and into the soil by selecting for plant-microbial relationships
that maximize soil carbon inputs.”
Wilson has found that carbon can be put into the ground by the plant’s roots and a
fungi that stores it directly. Different land-management practices can also make a
big difference in how carbon is trapped.
One of the larger challenges in developing biofuel plant-conversion processes is how
to increase yield without such a high level of so-called inputs, chemicals necessary
to grow healthy plants. A large amount of fertilizer effectively negates the value
of biofuel.
Large amounts of nitrogen and phosphorus are also counterproductive to the fungi that
Wilson studies.
“When you put on a lot of fertilizer, you get an immediate response. It’s not very
sustainable, but the response is easy to see, and that’s what a lot of people focus
on, I think,” she said. “In the United States, it’s a very common management practice.
What we’re proposing is a fairly large change.”
Her research in switchgrass also reflects something of the region’s agriculture, a
recognition of the growing scarcity of water resources that farmers already have to
deal with in Oklahoma.
The majority of the USDA grant will go through OSU over five years, with some funding
to related work in Northern Arizona University and Argonne National Laboratory.