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.