{"id":9923,"date":"2010-02-10T07:00:05","date_gmt":"2010-02-10T11:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=9923"},"modified":"2011-05-31T12:40:09","modified_gmt":"2011-05-31T16:40:09","slug":"developing-the-fuel-of-the-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2010\/02\/developing-the-fuel-of-the-future\/","title":{"rendered":"Developing the Fuel of the Future"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"<p>Michael<\/a>
Michael Raab, president of the startup company Agrivida, stands with stalks of corn growing in a greenhouse at the Agriculture Biotechnology Building. Photos by Peter Morenus<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Surrounded by corn growing in a greenhouse alongside UConn\u2019s BioScience Complex, Michael Raab stands amidst what may be the fuel of the future.<\/p>\n

Over the next few decades the world will need to wean itself from dependence on fossil fuels to help reduce global warming. One way could be with \u201cgreen crude,\u201d a new generation of transportation fuel made from nonfood crops.<\/p>\n

The corn around Raab has been engineered so that the whole plant, including leaves, stalks, and husks \u2013 the so-called \u201cstover\u201d that is commonly discarded after the corn is harvested \u2013 can be converted into high-value biofuel.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re on the right path,\u201d says Raab, president of Agrivida, a startup company he co-founded that is using biomolecular technology to develop an alternative fuel in the state-of-the-art greenhouses and labs of UConn\u2019s Technology Incubation Program. \u201cThere\u2019s no question our energy future is going to be more diverse than it is now.\u201d<\/p>\n

Scientists around the globe are racing to discover ways to turn biomass \u2013 such as lumber, garbage, algae, and crop wastes \u2013 into competitively priced fuels. Agrivida is part of the rush, seeking an economically sound and renewable, biologically based fuel to replace gasoline.<\/p>\n

Ethanol, a clean alternative fuel produced from sugars in crops such as corn and sugar cane, has been supported by federal blending incentives and has come under scrutiny for potentially affecting the price of corn and other basic foodstuffs. The Obama administration is betting that nonfood crops can eliminate these issues and provide a new generation of sustainable biofuels.<\/p>\n

\"<p>Photos<\/a>
Seedlings of bioengineered corn. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A 2008 federal law requires companies that blend gasoline to add increasing amounts of renewable fuels into the gas they sell over the next decade. Raab believes Agrivida\u2019s patented process for creating biofuels from agricultural biomass, which combines horsepower and green power, will appeal to those companies.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur development of nonfood energy crops will significantly increase ethanol production,\u201d he says. \u201cI think it\u2019s reasonable to be shooting for providing half of the nation\u2019s liquid transportation fuel with sustainable biofuels.\u201d<\/p>\n

Almost everything that grows on earth has cellulose that can be fermented into ethanol. Yet the main economic barrier to increased cellulosic ethanol production is the high cost of processing plant biomass into biofuel. The challenge lies in breaking down cellulose \u2013 the main component of plant cell walls \u2013 and converting it into useable sugars for biofuels production.<\/p>\n

Agrivida is developing a variety of energy crops \u2013 including switch grass, sugarcane, sorghum, and corn \u2013 to make ethanol production from cellulose commercially viable. The corn plants in UConn greenhouses have been engineered to make them capable of breaking down cellulose to provide rapid access to the sugars used to produce biofuels.<\/p>\n

Company researchers have bioengineered enzymes that are incorporated into the corn plants\u2019 cell walls. Agrivida\u2019s novel technology is a molecular switch that enables those enzymes to remain inactive while the corn plants grow.<\/p>\n

\"<p>A<\/a>
A researcher harvests corn embryos. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

At harvest, these enzymes are activated to degrade the entire mass of plant cellulose material into small sugars that can readily be converted into ethanol, thereby reducing processing costs for this raw material. By enabling the production of cheap sugars from cellulosic biomass, Raab estimates Agrivida can reduce processing costs by more than 30 percent, making the process commercially competitive with gasoline.<\/p>\n

Corn-based ethanol was established in the U.S. on an industrial scale because most of the elements to commercialize were in place: vast cornfields and an infrastructure for moving corn to processors, Raab explains. The search for better ethanol \u2013 or \u201ccellulosic ethanol\u201d \u2013 just takes the experience of corn ethanol a step further.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a lot of sugar in cellulose, so there\u2019s a lot of energy in it,\u201d he says. \u201cCellulosic ethanol is still more expensive to produce [than corn ethanol]. Yet the development of Agrivida\u2019s optimized enzymes to enhance cellulose degradation will help advance the commercialization of technologies that will dramatically increase cellulosic ethanol production.\u201d<\/p>\n

After completing graduate school in 2005, Raab started the company with money from grants and investment partners. In 2007, he located the company\u2019s plant engineering group in Storrs, after learning about UConn\u2019s technology incubator and greenhouses.<\/p>\n

Aimed at nurturing the successful startup of high-tech companies, the Technology Incubation Program offers fledgling entrepreneurs lab and office space with ready access to UConn researchers, facilities, and equipment, and to a variety of business and university services to help ensure their success.<\/p>\n

Agrivida now has 35 employees \u2013 including four UConn alumni and several current students \u2013 and has plans to expand its workforce in the coming years, when the company hopes to be able to sell its modified corn seed to ethanol production plants.<\/p>\n

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An incubator company based at UConn is using biomolecular technology to develop nonfood crops for fuel.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[46],"class_list":["post-9923","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-04 14:31:17","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9923","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9923"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9923\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37135,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9923\/revisions\/37135"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9923"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9923"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9923"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=9923"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=9923"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}