The North Carolina Biotechnology Center awarded two N.C. State students the NCBC Research Fellowship, a one-time grant of $5,000 for recipients to use over a one year period in the field of biotechnology research.
Brian Schuster, a sophomore in chemical engineering, said he was looking on the Internet for different research grants when he saw the NCBC one.
“I’m doing research on ethanol production using a bacteria to do consolidated bioprocessing, which is a way of combining the steps of ethanol production into fewer steps,” Schuster said.
Schuster said the research with ethanol he is working on is “kind of a new thing.”
“Ethanol has always been produced… and for a while it’s been produced on a large scale, even for fuel. So now we’re trying to get it from cellulosic feedstock, like from trees or sweet sorghum, grasses, things like that,” Schuster said.
Jason Whitham, a senior in biochemistry, said he got an email about the NCBC opportunity and felt it was perfect.
“It was an opportunity to get money to do collaborative research related to the biotechnology industry in North Carolina and the industry in North Carolina is highly tied to alternative fuels. Research Triangle Park has a ton of biotechnology companies. Another thing is we’re a huge agriculture state,” Whitham said. “The two industries nowadays are very much connected. They take waste products from farms and stuff and convert it to biotechnology products and alternative fuels. With the economy the way it is, the more solutions we bring by doing research, the more employment we’ll have.”
Whitham said he is doing work with Methanogens and Clostridia, both of which are really important for upcoming alternative fuel research.
“The Clostridium that I worked with last year was able to take smoke stack gas, synthesis gas, and convert it to ethanol and acetate. Ethanol is an alternative fuel that is becoming more and more important for this country,” Whitham said. “The other part they make is acetate, but acetate is not an alternative fuel.”
The hope is, Whitham said, in the future we’ll be able to take pollution and remove all the carbons from it, which would normally go into the atmosphere as greenhouse gases, increasing the temperature around the globe, and convert it to useful products like alternative fuels.
“This summer and the following semester my grant is providing money for me to look at Methanogens, which will take the acetate – that is, the byproduct of the Clostridia — and convert it to methane — which is also known as natural gas — which is also an alternative fuel,” Whitham said.
Schuster said corn is the number one feedstock right now, and the reason they use it is because it has a lot of starch in it.
“You can get the starch out and then convert that to ethanol a lot easier than you can convert cellulose to ethanol,” Schuster said. “As we move on and stop using corn — it’s mainly a food crop so that’s a big problem with it; people also demand it for food — and hopefully we can use a lot more cellulose and feedstock; especially sweet sorghum since that’s grown in North Carolina.”
Whitham said since grain is being converted to ethanol more and more, and grain is food, food prices are now connected to fuel prices because of that trend.
“But if we can do things like use waste products like smoke stack gas then we will be a lot better off,” Whitham said.
Looking at studies on biofuels, Schuster said ethanol and biofuels do reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
“Some people think it doesn’t come out with a net energy gain, but it does come out with 100 percent energy that is in the plant into ethanol. It does release energy, and you can harvest that. Gasoline needs an oxygenate to be added to it and ethanol is one of those,” Schuster said. “Most people just hear that [ethanol] is not producing any energy. I’ve looked at different technical documents and studies and the actual studies show that it does come out with more energy if you analyze the whole process.”
