Q to the Rescue!
Bostonians know the Quabbin
Reservoir as the source of their city's water supply. Thanks to a
tenacious UMass researcher and a zealous entrepreneur, the world
may soon know it as the home of a microbe that could fuel a
clean-energy revolution.
By Tom Matlack
Seventy-five miles west of the State House,
between Worcester and Springfield, a huge reservoir built in the
1930s holds the water that ultimately gushes from Boston's
showerheads every morning. On the western shore of this
39-square-mile lake, the Quabbin, near the town of Pelham, there
stands a forest of hemlocks and beeches. Running through the
forest is a small tributary that feeds into a stream that
empties into the Quabbin. And at the bottom of that tributary is
a muck of partially decayed leaves and sticks. In 1996, UMass
Amherst microbiologist Thomas Warnick waded into the muck,
leaned down, and dug up a tablespoonful. He scooped the black
slop into a jar and sealed the lid tightly. He was holding what
just might be the Holy Grail of microbiology.
At the time, of course, Warnick didn't know that. He simply
climbed out of the water and an hour later was back in the
Amherst lab of his colleague, professor Susan Leschine, where he
stuck the jar in a pile of containers holding the finest soil
from Brazil, Mexico, France, and Hawaii. Leschine was
researching microbes that break down plant waste—and within the
Quabbin sample, she soon isolated an unusual bug. When she
looked through her microscope, she saw a single-celled microbe
that wasn't round and fat like the ones collected from around
the globe, but slender, with a circular spore at one end, which
made it resemble a tiny lollipop. She came to call this microbe
"Q," a nod to its reservoir home.
Over time Leschine discovered that Q not only looked
different from any microbe she had seen, but also acted like no
other microbe. It had the ability to home in on many
compounds—particularly cellulose (the fibrous, insoluble
molecules that form a plant's cell walls), and turn it into
sugars, and then, even more surprising, transform the sugars
into pure ethanol. This was huge: Currently, plant waste has to
be run through machines (which consume energy of their own) in
order to make ethanol, a process that carries a steep price tag.
But Q could make ethanol on its own—in one step, with no
machinery involved. Its ethanol would be nearly as clean a power
source as solar or wind. All of which meant Q could probably
make someone a lot of money, too.
Susan Leschine is 62, with blond hair and freckles.
She's known around campus as much for her warmth as her
intelligence; in her lab, she greets visitors with a smile and a
touch on the arm. Leschine has the ability to explain very
complicated things very easily, a useful skill for someone whose
research deals with the physiology, ecology, and diversity of
polymer-decomposing members of microbial communities.
Leschine has spent 30-plus years identifying new species of
anaerobic bacteria—the kind that don't need oxygen to grow—and
figuring out how they work. She's always been interested in
microscopic bugs that eat big stuff without the benefit of a
mouth. The small number of microbes that can find and feed on
much larger plant material underwater actually turn themselves
inside out to accomplish the trick. "Sticks and leaves obviously
do break down at the bottom of a pond," Leschine says. "But how
is a mystery," since the cellulose they contain won't break down
on its own.
In 1996, she tested the Quabbin soil for its ability to
consume plant cellulose by putting a small sample on a piece of
filter paper and pouring water over it. Then she waited a few
days to see whether the paper disappeared. It did. The Quabbin
muck ate the paper. Intrigued, she examined the zoology in the
soil in an attempt to isolate the individual microbe doing the
work. It took Leschine several months of comparing microbes
against textbooks and then peering back at the soil to single
out Q.
She noticed that Q, trying to locate its food, released
dozens of enzymes into the water; she'd never seen a microbe
release so many. These enzymes attacked almost any plant
cellulose, breaking it down into sugar. The microbe then
"smelled" the sugar in the water, swam toward the plant, and
gorged itself.
Leschine initially focused on Q's adaptability, its ability
to eat any waste, as its unique trait; it didn't occur to her to
think about the importance of its ethanol-generating prowess.
Then, in 2005, she conducted an experiment, feeding Q more plant
material to see if ethanol production would jump. While Leschine
had discovered other bugs that consumed sugar and made trace
amounts of ethanol, there was never a 1:1 ratio of increased
food intake and increased ethanol production. In fact, with
other bugs, the ethanol production had hardly budged at all. But
with Q, the more sugar she fed it, the more ethanol it put out.
"That was the moment that the light bulb went on."
Leschine loved being a professor, and had never dreamed of
starting a company. Yet as UMass faculty, she had a contract
with the state requiring her to divulge any discovery made in
her lab that might have commercial application. "In the end, I
felt obligated to disclose what I had found," she says. "I
thought, ‘Wow, this could actually be really useful to humans.'
As opposed to much of microbiology."
Parviz Tayebati grew up around oil fields.
Today the 48-year-old entrepreneur
lives in the Ritz towers in Downtown Crossing with his wife and two
small children. Though he looks like a Harley rider—shaved head,
dark eyes, closely cropped goatee—he is also a farmer, with a second
home in Sherborn where he raises chickens and goats. But he's not
much for the slowed-down life. Tayebati speaks so quickly and with
such enthusiasm that it's sometimes tough to follow him.
The man has always known energy. He was born in
1960 in Azna, Iran, along the Zagros Mountains, halfway between
Tehran and the Iraqi border. The town existed to produce oil; his
father was an oil field technician. Though Tayebati didn't come from
a particularly academic family, he loved mathematics and physics.
They kept his mind from the speeches of Muslim insurrectionists
beyond his window.
Tayebati went to college in Great Britain at the
University of Birmingham, leaving Iran just months before the shah
was overthrown in January 1979. He never returned home. Tayebati
received a Ph.D. in quantum electronics from the University of
Southern California in 1989, and four years later founded a company
called CoreTek that developed technology to help phone companies
switch calls across fiber-optic cables. In 2000, just after becoming
a U.S. citizen, Tayebati caught the peak of the Internet boom,
selling his business to Nortel for $1.43 billion. After the tech
bubble burst, he searched for something new to invest in. He chose
what he knew, but with a twist: green energy.
Tayebati quickly sized up the problem. Though
energy independence has become a national goal, 70 percent of
America's gasoline is imported. The alternative thus far has been
corn ethanol, which in theory burns cleaner than oil. Last year, 6.5
billion gallons of the stuff were produced in the U.S. But using
corn to make ethanol means it is not being used to feed people or
livestock, which, according to some research, has driven up food
prices. Worse, the conversion of corn to fuel burns more energy than
it produces.
Plant waste would be an ideal substitute for corn.
The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 mandates as much:
16 billion gallons of renewable fuel must come from cellulosic
ethanol by 2022. The problem with cellulosic ethanol at this point
is that you need two factories to produce the stuff: one to break
down the waste into sugar, and another to turn the sugar into
ethanol. That's not efficient. Or cheap. But Tayebati would learn
that a new entry to the market could be both.
In October 2006, Tayebati attended a
CleanTech conference in Boston, where
he met Jef Sharp, an entrepreneur from Northampton. Just days
before, Sharp and Leschine—who were introduced by a mutual
friend—had launched SunEthanol, with Sharp as CEO and Leschine as
chief scientist.
As he talked with Sharp, Tayebati immediately
understood the importance of what Sharp was describing. If Q could
break down plant waste on its own, it meant there now existed a
one-step process for producing cellulosic ethanol. But Tayebati
wanted to see it for himself. So he drove to Amherst to meet with
Leschine a week later. "When I walked into her lab, I smelled gas,"
he recalls. "I looked around to see if they had been using ethanol
to clean instruments or something. Sue said it was just her bug. I
thought, ‘Oh, my God!'"
Since Q was a newly discovered species, exclusive
to the Quabbin Reservoir, the chances of market duplication, in
mogul-speak, were nil. As soon as Tayebati got back into his car, he
called his friends at Battery Ventures, a large Boston venture
capital firm, to tell them what he'd found. Soon Battery was
spending days meeting with Leschine. After that, two more companies
wanted in: a small western Massachusetts VC firm named Long River;
and South Dakota–based Verasun, the largest corn ethanol producer in
the world. In May 2007, they all poured $4 million into SunEthanol.
They're now in the process of raising $20 million more.
The Department of Energy sees Q as a crucial
technology, and it has already given SunEthanol four research
grants. The ultimate goal is to produce energy in a manner that is
truly carbon-neutral: Cars will burn ethanol, emitting the carbon
dioxide that plants will absorb through photosynthesis. Then Q will
eat plant waste to create more ethanol.
SunEthanol's first pilot plant is scheduled to
start production in 2009, likely in Springfield, and currently
awaits approval of $2.8 million in federal funding. The company is
negotiating with paper and cardboard plants to use their paper
remnants, with the hope that the ethanol produced at the facility
will power factories now using coal.
Q has another booster in Governor Deval Patrick,
who called it a "transformational breakthrough" while speaking to
the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce in May. He is also proposing
the state exempt the gas tax on SunEthanol to help the company bring
its products to market quickly. "If Massachusetts gets clean energy
right," he said, "the whole world will be our customer."
For all the talk of how Q improves on the model of corn
ethanol, it still has to borrow some of its language.
Ethanol yield is similar to a commodity's yield: How much product
can you glean from an area of land? Take corn. The bushels you get
from an acre are the corn's yield. The same holds true for Q: The
ethanol you get from a microbe is the bug's yield.
The original microbe found at Quabbin produced a
yield of just under 1 percent ethanol. Six months after forming
SunEthanol, Leschine and her team had Q tripling the yield. They
have since kept at the task, preserving only the most potent strains
of the microbe so that each successive generation puts out more
ethanol than the last.
Five percent is the tipping point at which
distilling becomes commercially viable. SunEthanol says Q will be
there, and beyond, within the next three fiscal quarters. The
superbug just keeps getting more super.
UMass Amherst Spinoff Raises $25 Million for
Ethanol Breakthrough
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