At this writing, we are nearing the end of the seventeenth year of funding from DOE’s Biofuels program to pursue and support the development of a biomass-to-ethanol industry in the United States. During this time, the benefits of a sustained level of funding to the program have become abundantly clear (although sometimes only in retrospect). We have taken a technology with roots in antiquity (i. e., fuel ethanol was produced by desperate governments embroiled in World Wars I and II) and brought it into the age of genetic engineering and advanced computer modeling. This was done for a very important reason-commercializable biomass-to-ethanol technology in the 1990s and beyond must be finely tuned and resembles the old fermentation processes in general form only. Herein lies the dilemma: at the surface bioethanol production appears technically simple; however, when considered in view of today’s complex markets (e. g., costs and values for fuels and biomass) and business/environmental requirements, this initial impression fades and the need for technical acuity becomes obvious.

From our perspective, activities that occur from 1997 to the year 2000 will set the stage for the success or failure of the bioethanol industry. The primary driving factor for this opinion is the sudden and substantial increase in interest by the private sector in bioethanol production. To meet this challenge, biomass conversion researchers must address the issues urgently needed by first (alpha) plants. These plants will be sited in locations specifically chosen by investors for optimal access to infrastructure, including biomass and water resources, fermentation and electrical power facilities, by-product markets, and labor availability. The first processing plants will not be chosen for fit to feedstocks and technology. Even the impact of political mandates will overshadow technical preparedness. The biomass conversion research programs must, therefore, be keenly sensitive to the direction of industry and empowered to support it.

A sustained energy future for the United States also requires energetic support of technologies appropriate to longer-term energy feedstocks. Once the initial bioethanol industry has been established, technologies that provide incremental improvements in specific unit operations, as well as those that permit access to entirely new feedstocks, will ensure a robust and secure industry. A valuable lesson can be learned from the current corn-to-ethanol industry, in which the inability to process varied feedstocks (i. e., lignocellulose as well as com and grain) has left processing plants precariously dependent on the volatile corn market. Future success of bioethanol plants lies in tolerance of feedstock diversity. Incremental technical improvements and new "leap-forward" technologies require active and vigorous advanced research programs. Apart from the obvious benefits to the bioethanol industry, and like all applied/basic research programs, these activities provide spinoff technical benefits that enhance the competitiveness of the general U. S. industry. Specific examples could include insights into cellulose and lignin chemistry from feedstock selection and analysis activities, insights into the kinetics of sugar hydrolysis, sugar destruction, and toxin formation from biomass pretreatment activities, insights into the biochemistry of enzymes that act on insoluble polymers from cellulase improvement activities, insights into the control and analysis of metabolic pathways in fermentative microorganisms from ethanologen improvement activities, insights into the microbiology of methanogenesis from waste treatment activities, and insights into animal feed/nutrient requirement methodologies from plant by-product recovery activities. Thus, the DOE-funded biomass-to-ethanol R&D program offers many levels of benefit to U. S. industry and represents a continuing success story for critical research managed by a national laboratory.

Acknowledgments

This work was funded by the Biochemical Conversion Element within the Biofuels Systems Program of the Office of Fuels Development of the U. S. Department of Energy.