BIO 2008 - Use that bagasse!

Late last year, Queensland Premier Anna Bligh announced an exciting new partnership for both Australian science and the global push for renewable energies.

Local agricultural biotechnology company Farmacule and Queensland University of Technology (QUT) have partnered with Syngenta, the world's largest agribusiness company, to develop and commercialise cost-effective cellulosic ethanol from sugarcane waste.

The partnership is being driven in Australia by Professor James Dale, an internationally renowned biotechnology researcher and director of the new Renewable Biocommodities Precinct at QUT. Dale is also the chief scientific officer and company director of Farmacule, which was set up to commercialise this new area of research.

In 2005, Dale's group at QUT secured a Grand Challenges in Global Health Initiative grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to apply their genetic engineering expertise to growing biofortified crop plants for use in developing nations, including rice. Syngenta provides some of the molecular technology to the Golden Rice project for its humanitarian program.

And so, during the regular meetings for participants in the Grand Challenges programs, Dale got to know Syngenta's head of biotechnology, Adrian Dubock, who was on the humanitarian board of the Golden Rice project and who is credited as the architect of the public-private partnership that has made Golden Rice possible.

"We got to talking one day about bioethanol and sugar cane and Adrian said how interested Syngenta was to get into this space - they were already in similar ventures with corn - and how interested they were in our technology," Dale says. This really set the ball rolling."

The next cog fell into place at BIO 2006 in Chicago. Dale invited Dubock to address a lunch that QUT hosts at BIO each year and managed to wangle a seat next to Bligh, who was deputy premier at the time. "The discussion moved to biofuels ... and away it went from there."

Dale and QUT started negotiations with Syngenta at the end of 2006 and approximately 12 months later, a deal was signed. "The Queensland Government has put $2 million into the venture already (with more promised) and Anna Bligh has personally shown a lot of interest. So, she really has been there right from the start, which has been invaluable support for us."

Core technology

The technology that caught Syngenta's interest was developed by Dale and colleagues several years ago at QUT and called INPACT. Farmacule was spun out of QUT in 2001 based on INPACT, which stands for 'in-plant activation' and involves the activation and amplification of transgene expression in plants. It is like a molecular switch, as Dale explains.

"When you put a gene in a plant using this technology, you can control when it is turned on and you can turn it on at very high levels of expression," he says.

This molecular technology was developed originally to make high-value proteins in tobacco plants, with the first product from that project due to market by 2009.

In the context of the sugar cane to ethanol project, INPACT will allow researchers to make transgenic plants that express cellulose-hydrolysing enzymes at a specific time (so that the plant is not damaged) and at high levels. In this way, cellulose in the cane bagasse (the dry biomass left over after sugar extraction) can be efficiently and cost-effectively converted to fuel-grade bioethanol without compromising the sugar extraction.

The INPACT technology was certainly pivotal in the case Dale put forward to Syngenta during the early negotiations, but the clincher according to him was the total package that Farmacule and QUT could bring to the table.

Besides their internationally established expertise and facilities in plant biotechnology, the research centre at QUT headed by Dale also houses the Sugar Innovations and Research Initiative. "This means we could actually provide technology and expertise to go from the gene discovery and genetic modifications step right through to pilot production and processing."

The partnership has now taken shape under Dale's umbrella at QUT as the Syngenta Centre for Sugarcane and Biofuels Development. Ten new scientists are being employed to work on the project, with four employed directly by Syngenta and the rest employed through QUT.

"We are now at the stage of putting all the different components together. We will have our team here and one based in North Carolina, so the project can use the combined resources most effectively and efficiently."

---PB--- The 'Holy Grail' of biofuels

So, why is fermenting waste so exciting for the whole renewable fuels industry? It is now painfully clear, even to the US President, that an ever-warming planet and decreasing fossil fuel reserves are problematic for the oil industry. We need alternative energy sources that are clean, sustainable, easy to handle and cost-effective - and we need them kinda quickly.

Some years ago, bioethanol was hailed as the answer. However, the predicament of creating extra arable land by cutting down CO2-producing rainforests and using edible crops to fuel our cars and trucks is increasingly apparent, particularly as three-quarters of the world's population rely on agriculture to live and do not drive cars.

Food riots are becoming increasingly commonplace, and have intensified in the past few months, while the possible link between high food prices link and bioethanol production is a regular news item and is on the agenda of several global meetings this year, including the G8 summit in July.

Cellulosic ethanol (CE) has emerged as a possible new answer, with potential sources ranging from corn and sugar cane leftovers to grasses and other plants grown specifically (and cheaply) for that purpose. Cellulose is indeed the most abundant organic molecule on the planet and scientists know how to turn it into ethanol.

However, it is not all that easy to turn the complex polysaccharides in cellulose into fermentable sugars, and certainly not in a cost-effective way. In fact, reducing the cost of cellulose hydrolysis remains the biggest hurdle to the future of the CE industry.

Research organisations are leading the way to a solving these problems, backed now by powerful global initiatives, governments and multinational companies. It seems that the powers that be and the money behind them have realised the importance of plant-based biomass as an inexpensive and environmentally friendly energy source that does not affect the food and feed chain.

According to Dale, CE is the "holy grail of bioethanol at the moment".

Commercial CE plants are already in operation in Canada and Spain using wheat straw, with many others planned in US and Europe.

"Biomass represents a vastly bigger resource than crops grown specifically for conversion to ethanol, and much of this waste is just left to rot or be burnt," Dale says.

"Sugarcane is probably the best example of that. In Australia, the waste is burnt - about 50 per cent for power to power the mills and the other 50 per cent to get rid of it. Some groups are setting up co-generation plants to take some of the excess power generated from the waste and put it back into the grid but this is quite expensive from a capital equipment perspective."

Others are adding enzymes to the waste in massive amounts. However, even with recent scientific improvements in the efficiency of natural enzymes from fungi or other sources, the amount of enzyme needed for a useful-size plant is neither economical nor practical.

"On current estimates, you would need 15 metric tonnes of enzyme every day and the enzyme fermentation plant would be bigger than the ethanol plant!" In fact, the US Department of Energy Biofuels program recently identified the high cost of cellulose enzymes as the key barrier to economic production of CE.

---PB--- Proof in the pudding

Many approaches are being taken worldwide to get around this problem, and what the Syngenta centre in Brisbane aims to do is genetically modify sugarcane to produce cellulases, while maintaining the sugar content of the cane.

"We thought, what is the cheapest way to produce these enzymes - get the plant to produce them," Dale says. "But, the plants don't want to produce them naturally and we don't want to destroy the plant, so we are combining our INPACT technology with Syngenta's molecular IP to put appropriate enzymes into the sugar cane plant, and do it such that the genes are not expressed until we want them to be expressed and then at very high levels, so about two to three days before harvest ... that's the plan."

Thus, both the existing consumer sucrose product and ethanol for fuel can be produced in a sort-of one-stop-shop, providing a potential second income stream to sugar producers and ultimately a more sustainable sugarcane industry in Australia.

The global market for this technology is vast: adapting it to other biomass sources such as switch grass in the US, for example, could revolutionise CE production almost immediately.

With the joint venture now up and running, Dale and his team are focussing on outcomes. The first sugar cane field trial is planned for 2010 and a $7.5 million pilot plant is already under construction at Mackay in North Queensland, next to an existing sugar mill.

When everything else is in place, this mill and plant will process the transgenic sugar cane for commercial production.