Energy in the News

New focus on alternative energy shines spotlight on researchers

By: Tim Simmons

Ratna Sharma didn't attract much attention when she started doing research on the properties of cotton stalks and switchgrass almost four years ago. But that was before gas sold for $3 a gallon and green was a marketing strategy instead of a color.

Now the assistant professor at N.C. State University is part of a national push to create alternative forms of energy -- a movement that is making little eco-stars out of otherwise anonymous scientists.

"All of a sudden, I'm a very smart person," joked Sharma, who is part of NCSU's Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering.

Sharma's moment of fame occurred earlier this year when she was asked to join a delegation that met with President Bush at the Novozymes plant in Franklinton. Novozymes makes enzymes used to produce ethanol.

University officials say it's hard to recall a time when business interests, policymakers and the scientists who study natural resources have come together like this in pursuit of a common goal.

Barely a month passes when a politician isn't touring a Triangle-area lab to tout the potential of alternative fuels. This week there were two -- a stop at NCSU's Centennial Campus to bring attention to projects involving ethanol and jet fuel and another tour in Oxford to talk about biofuels.

"Activity in these areas has really picked up in the past 18 months," said Robert Brown, dean of the College of Natural Resources at NCSU.

Brown said the extra attention will allow his college to hire two new faculty members this year -- a search that should offer some insights into whether an increased interest in alternative energy means increased competition for faculty.

"If they are hotshots in an emerging area, sometimes they might ask for a half million in equipment to do research," Brown said. "That can quickly drive up the costs."

But interest in being ecologically sensitive -- for the sake of the environment or the bottom line -- isn't limited to biofuels.

Doug Crawford-Brown, director of the Institute for the Environment at UNC-Chapel Hill, said businesses are far more interested today than even a few years ago in broader issues of sustainable growth.

"It's a bit of replacement of the polarized vision of you either have environmental quality or you have economic growth," Crawford-Brown said. "They are starting to get a sense that we must somehow balance multiple goals."

Without a tried-and-true game plan on how to achieve that balance, policymakers and businesses are turning to researchers. This year, for example, BP agreed to spend $500 million to establish a program at the University of California, Berkeley, to develop new sources of energy and reduce pollution.

The pledge dwarfed other programs, but that shouldn't discount their importance, Brown said.

Earlier this year, for example, North Carolina's Golden LEAF Foundation awarded NCSU a $1.5 million grant to build a small-scale ethanol plant on Lake Wheeler Road in Raleigh. The new state budget sets aside $5 million for the biofuels plant in Oxford.

Vincent Chiang is a researcher who finds himself involved in the push and pull among business, research and national policies.

For years, Chiang's research has focused on a substance known as lignin -- the sticky gluelike substance that gives a tree its stiffness. It is difficult and expensive to separate lignin from wood.

Even before Chiang came to NCSU in 2002, his work attracted international attention from pulp and paper companies. Those companies were interested in using his research to reduce their costs and improve profits -- a classic business-academic partnership.

But genetically altered trees with less lignin can also be used to produce biofuels such as ethanol. That has brought a new partner to the table -- the U.S. Department of Energy -- with a research grant of $1.9 million.

"My research has been going on for years, but it's a different political climate now," Chiang said.

Tim Turner, an NCSU graduate student working with professor Bill Roberts on converting animal fat into jet fuel, said he sees the issue from a different perspective.

When Turner obtained his first master's degree in electrical engineering in 1979, manufacturers were buzzing about robotics and predicting an economic transformation. Researchers in the field were a hot commodity.

But robotics was not a technology that people needed in the same way as fuel, and eventually demand leveled off.

"Alternative energy isn't like that," Turner said. "It's an area where the demand and the attention won't fade anytime soon."

That doesn't mean today's researchers will remain in the spotlight forever. At some point the energy puzzle will be solved, or today's scientists will have offered all they know.

Then attention will shift and someone else will be thrust into the limelight.

"My niche is making new things that do not exist today," said Wenbin Lin, a scientist at UNC-CH who is working on a more efficient way to make biodiesel fuel.

That niche might involve alternative energy -- or it might not. Lin's other areas of research, for example, involve the imaging of tumors and cancers as well as the delivery of cancer drugs.

"I have a certain skills, but how I use them depends on my partners," he said.