The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced this week it will invest up to $375 million over five years in three new Bioenergy Research Centers to be located in Madison, Wisconsin; Oak Ridge, Tennessee; and near Berkeley, California. The winning sites were selected through a competitive, peer-review process that began last year and included more than a dozen applicants from across the country.

Using multidisciplinary teams from several institutions, the centers' research will emphasize understanding how to re-engineer biological processes to develop new, more efficient methods for converting the cellulose in plant material into ethanol or other biofuels that serve as a substitute for gasoline. DOE believes this research is critical because future biofuels production will require the use of feedstocks more diverse than corn, including cellulosic material such as agricultural residues, grasses, poplar trees, inedible plants, and nonedible portions of crops.

Growth Dimensions for Belvidere and Boone County looks forward to nurturing opportunities and continued partnerships stemming from the recent announcement of one Wisconsin-based research center. The economic development agency's AgTech Initiative, which is an effort that fosters and accelerates the commercialization of new uses technologies for agricultural crops, new uses for agricultural crops, includes the University of Wisconsin- Madison and the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation as collaborative partners in AgTech's commercialization efforts.

Growth Dimensions has also developed the Biomass Commercialization Award Program to provide qualified clients with funds on a cost share basis to commercialize biomass or agricultural based materials into alternative industrial products. The DOE is the source of funds for this award program.

Norb Ziemer, director of the New Uses Entrepreneurship Development Center, the core component of the AgTech Initiative, believes that the latest investment by the Department of Energy illustrates the strategic alignment being formed through DOE platform programs.

"This is a great opportunity both for our region and for the nation. The Department of Energy has demonstrated its commitment to invest in key research which will help propel new biomass process technologies. The anticipated breakthroughs will help facilitate substitute products to replace traditional petroleum-based products, and will make new feedstock options more viable and more commercially available," stated Ziemer. "The University of Wisconsin-Madison will work to develop and refine these emerging technologies from biomass, and the AgTech Initiative will support the entrepreneurial activity involved in helping these new technologies enter the market."

The centers will bring together diverse teams of researchers from 18 of the nation's leading universities, seven DOE national laboratories, at least one nonprofit organization, and a range of private companies. All three centers are located in geographically distinct areas and will use different plants both for laboratory research and for improving feedstock crops.

The three Bioenergy Research Centers involve the following partners:

• The DOE BioEnergy Science Center led by the DOE's Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge. Collaborators include Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta; DOE's National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo.; University of Georgia in Athens, Ga.; Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H.; and the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.
• The DOE Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center will be led by the University of Wisconsin in Madison, in close collaboration with Michigan State University in East Lansing, Mich. Other collaborators include: DOE's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash.; Lucigen Corporation in Middleton, Wisc.; University of Florida in Gainesville, Fla.; DOE's Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tenn.; Illinois State University in Normal, Ill.; and Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa.
• The DOE Joint BioEnergy Institute will be led by DOE's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and collaborators include: Sandia National Laboratories; DOE's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; University of California - Berkeley; University of California - Davis; and Stanford University.

The mission of the Bioenergy Research Centers will lie between basic and applied science, focusing on bioenergy applications. The centers aim to identify practical solutions to producing renewable, carbon- neutral energy. At the same time, the centers will be grounded in basic research, pursuing alternative avenues and a range of high-risk, high-return approaches to finding solutions. To some degree, one key to the centers' success will be their ability to develop the more basic dimensions of their research to a point that can easily transition to applied research.

Subject to the finalization of contract terms and congressional appropriations, the centers are expected to begin work in 2008 and be fully operational by 2009