Juan Enriquez: Using biology to rethink the energy challenge

What is bioenergy? Bioenergy is not ethanol.

Bioenergy isn't global warming. Bioenergy is

something which seems counterintuitive. Bioenergy

is oil. It's gas. It's coal. And part of building

that bridge to the future, to the point where we

can actually see the oceans in a rational way, or

put up these geo-spatial orbits that will twirl or

do microwaves or stuff, is going to depend on how

we understand bioenergy and manage it. And to do

that, you really have to look first at agriculture.

So we've been planting stuff for 11,000 years. And

in the measure that we plant stuff, what we learn

from agriculture is you've got to deal with pests,

you've got to deal with all types of awful things,

you've got to cultivate stuff. In the measure

that you learn how to use water to cultivate, then

you're going to be able to spread beyond the Nile.

You're going to be able to power stuff, so irrigation

makes a difference.

Irrigation starts to make you be allowed to plant

stuff where you want it, as opposed to where the

rivers flood. You start getting this organic

agriculture; you start putting machinery onto this

stuff. Machinery, with a whole bunch of water,

leads to very large-scale agriculture.

You put together machines and water, and you get

landscapes that look like this. And then you get

sales that look like this. It's brute force. So

what you've been doing in agriculture is you start

out with something that's a reasonably natural

system. You start taming that natural system. You

put a lot of force behind that natural system. You

put a whole bunch of pesticides and herbicides --

(Laughter) -- behind that natural system, and you

end up with systems that look like this.

And it's all brute force. And that's the way we've

been approaching energy. So the lesson in

agriculture is that you can actually change the

system that's based on brute force as you start

merging that system and learning that system and

actually applying biology. And you move from a

discipline of engineering, you move from a

discipline of chemistry, into a discipline of

biology. And probably one of the most important

human beings on the planet is this guy behind me.

This is a guy called Norman Borlaug. He won the

Nobel Prize. He's got the Congressional Medal of

Honor. He deserves all of this stuff. And he

deserves this stuff because he probably has fed

more people than any other human being alive

because he researched how to put biology behind

seeds. He did this in Mexico. The reason why India

and China no longer have these massive famines is

because Norman Borlaug taught them how to grow

grains in a more efficient way and launched the

Green Revolution. That is something that a lot of

people have criticized. But of course, those are

people who don't realize that China and India,

instead of having huge amounts of starving people,

are exporting grains.

And the irony of this particular system is the

place where he did the research, which was Mexico,

didn't adopt this technology, ignored this

technology, talked about why this technology

should be thought about, but not really applied.

And Mexico remains one of the largest grain

importers on the planet because it doesn't apply

technology that was discovered in Mexico. And in

fact, hasn't recognized this man, to the point

where there aren't statues of this man all over

Mexico. There are in China and India. And the

Institute that this guy ran has now moved to

India. That is the difference between adopting

technologies and discussing technologies.

Now, it's not just that this guy fed a huge amount

of people in the world. It's that this is the net

effect in terms of what technology does, if you

understand biology.

What happened in agriculture? Well, if you take

agriculture over a century, agriculture in about

1900 would have been recognizable to somebody

planting a thousand years earlier. Yeah, the plows look

different. The machines were tractors or stuff

instead of mules, but the farmer would have

understood: this is what the guy's doing, this is

why he's doing it, this is where he's going. What

really started to change in agriculture is when

you started moving from this brute force

engineering and chemistry into biology, and that's

where you get your productivity increases. And as

you do that stuff, here's what happens to

productivity.

Basically, you go from 250 hours to produce 100

bushels, to 40, to 15, to five. Agricultural labor

productivity increased seven times, 1950 to 2000,

whereas the rest of the economy increased about

2.5 times. This is an absolutely massive increase

in how much is produced per person.

The effect of this, of course, is it's not just

amber waves of grain, it is mountains of stuff.

And 50 percent of the EU budget is going to subsidize

agriculture from mountains of stuff that people

have overproduced.

This would be a good outcome for energy. And of

course, by now, you're probably saying to

yourself, "Self, I thought I came to a talk about

energy and here's this guy talking about biology."

So where's the link between these two things?

One of the ironies of this whole system is we're

discussing what to do about a system that we don't

understand. We don't even know what oil is. We

don't know where oil comes from. I mean,

literally, it's still a source of debate what

this black river of stuff is and where it comes

from. The best assumption, and one of the best

guesses in this stuff, is that this stuff comes

out of this stuff, that these things absorb

sunlight, rot under pressure for millions of

years, and you get these black rivers.

Now, the interesting thing about that thesis -- if

that thesis turns out to be true -- is that oil,

and all hydrocarbons, turned out to be

concentrated sunlight. And if you think of

bioenergy, bioenergy isn't ethanol. Bioenergy is

taking the sun, concentrating it in amoebas,

concentrating it in plants, and maybe that's why

you get these rainbows.

And as you're looking at this system, if

hydrocarbons are concentrated sunlight, then

bioenergy works in a different way. And we've got

to start thinking of oil and other hydrocarbons as

part of these solar panels.

Maybe that's one of the reasons why if you fly

over west Texas, the types of wells that you're

beginning to see don't look unlike those pictures

of Kansas and those irrigated plots.

This is how you farm oil. And as you think of

farming oil and how oil has evolved, we started

with this brute force approach. And then what did

we learn? Then we learned we had to go bigger. And

then what'd we learn? Then we have to go even

bigger. And we are getting really destructive as

we're going out and farming this bioenergy.

These are the Athabasca tar sands, and there's an

enormous amount -- first of mining, the largest

trucks in the world are working here, and then

you've got to pull out this black sludge, which is

basically oil that doesn't flow. It's tied to the

sand. And then you've got to use a lot of steam to

separate it, which only works at today's oil

prices.

Coal. Coal turns out to be virtually the same

stuff. It is probably plants, except that these

have been burned and crushed under pressure.

So you take something like this, you burn it, you

put it under pressure, and likely as not, you get

this. Although, again, I stress: we don't know.

Which is curious as we debate all this stuff. But

as you think of coal, this is what burned wheat

kernels look like. Not entirely unlike coal.

And of course, coalmines are very dangerous

places because in some of these coalmines, you

get gas. When that gas blows up, people die. So

you're producing a biogas out of coal in some

mines, but not in others.

Any place you see a differential, there're some

interesting questions. There's some questions as

to what you should be doing with this stuff. But

again, coal. Maybe the same stuff, maybe the same

system, maybe bioenergy, and you're applying

exactly the same technology.

Here's your brute force approach. Once you get

through your brute force approach, then you just

rip off whole mountaintops. And you end up with

the single largest source of carbon emissions,

which are coal-fired gas plants. That is probably

not the best use of bioenergy.

As you think of what are the alternatives to this

system -- it's important to find alternatives

because it turns out that the U.S. is dwindling in

its petroleum reserves, but it is not dwindling in

its coal reserves, nor is China. There are huge

coal reserves that are sitting out there, and

we've got to start thinking of them as biological

energy, because if we keep treating them as

chemical energy, or engineering energy, we're

going to be in deep doo-doo.

Gas is a similar issue. Gas is also a biological

product. And as you think of gas, well, you're

familiar with gas. And here's a different way of

mining coal.

This is called coal bed methane. Why is this

picture interesting? Because if coal turns out to

be concentrated plant life, the reason why you may

get a differential in gas output between one mine

and another -- the reason why one mine may blow up

and another one may not blow up -- may be because

there's stuff eating that stuff and producing gas.

This is a well-known phenomenon. (Laughter) You

eat certain things, you produce a lot of gas. It

may turn out that biological processes in coalmines

have the same process. If that is true, then

one of the ways of getting the energy out of coal

may not be to rip whole mountaintops off, and it

may not be to burn coal. It may be to have stuff

process that coal in a biological fashion as you

did in agriculture.

That is what bioenergy is. It is not ethanol. It

is not subsidies to a few companies. It is not

importing corn into Iowa because you've built so

many of these ethanol plants. It is beginning to

understand the transition that occurred in

agriculture, from brute force into biological

force. And in the measure that you can do that,

you can clean some stuff, and you can clean it

pretty quickly.

We already have some indicators of productivity on

this stuff. OK, if you put steam into coal fields

or petroleum fields that have been running for

decades, you can get a really substantial

increase, like an eight-fold increase, in your

output. This is just the beginning stages of this

stuff.

And as you think of biomaterials, this guy -- who

did part of the sequencing of the human genome,

who just doubled the databases of genes and

proteins known on earth by sailing around the

world -- has been thinking about how you structure

this. And there's a series of smart people

thinking about this. And they've been putting

together companies like Synthetic Genomics, like,

a Cambria, like Codon, and what those companies are

trying to do is to think of, how do you apply

biological principles to avoid brute force?

Think of it in the following terms. Think of it as

beginning to program stuff for specific purposes.

Think of the cell as a hardware. Think of the

genes as a software. And in the measure that you

begin to think of life as code that is

interchangeable, that can become energy, that can

become food, that can become fiber, that can

become human beings, that can become a whole

series of things, then you've got to shift your

approach as to how you're going to structure and

deal and think about energy in a very different

way.

What are the first principles of this stuff and

where are we heading? This is one of the gentle

giants on the planet. He's one of the nicest human

beings you've ever met. His name is Hamilton

Smith. He won the Nobel for figuring out how to

cut genes -- something called restriction enzymes.

He was at Hopkins when he did this, and he's such

a modest guy that the day he won, his mother

called him and said, "I didn't realize there was

another Ham Smith at Hopkins. Do you know he just

won the Nobel?" (Laughter) I mean, that was Mom,

but anyway, this guy is just a class act. You find

him at the bench every single day, working on a

pipette and building stuff. And one of the things

this guy just built are these things.

What is this? This is the first transplant of

naked DNA, where you take an entire DNA operating

system out of one cell, insert it into a different

cell, and have that cell boot up as a separate

species. That's one month old. You will see stuff

in the next month that will be just as important

as this stuff.

And as you think about this stuff and what the

implications of this are, we're going to start not

just converting ethanol from corn with very high

subsidies. We're going to start thinking about

biology entering energy. It is very expensive to

process this stuff, both in economic terms and in

energy terms.

This is what accumulates in the tar sands of

Alberta. These are sulfur blocks. Because as you

separate that petroleum from the sand, and use an

enormous amount of energy inside that vapor --

steam to separate this stuff -- you also have to

separate out the sulfur. The difference between

light crude and heavy crude -- well, it's about 14

bucks a barrel. That's why you're building these

pyramids of sulfur blocks. And by the way, the

scale on these things is pretty large.

Now, if you can take part of the energy content

out of doing this, you reduce the system, and you

really do start applying biological principles to

energy. This has to be a bridge to the point where

you can get to wind, to the point where you can

get to solar, to the point where you can get to

nuclear -- and hopefully you won't build the next

nuclear plant on a beautiful seashore next to an

earthquake fault. (Laughter) Just a thought.

But in the meantime, for the next decade at least,

the name of the game is hydrocarbons. And be that

oil, be that gas, be that coal, this is what we're

dealing with. And before I make this talk too

long, here's what's happening in the current

energy system.

86 percent of the energy we consume are

hydrocarbons. That means 86 percent of the stuff we're

consuming are probably processed plants and

amoebas and the rest of the stuff. And there's a

role in here for conservation. There's a role in

here for alternative stuff, but we've also got to

get that other portion right.

How we deal with that other portion is our bridge

to the future. And as we think of this bridge to

the future, one of the things you should ponder

is: we are leaving about two-thirds of the oil today

inside those wells. So we're spending an enormous

amount of money and leaving most of the energy

down there. Which, of course, requires more energy

to go out and get energy. The ratios become

idiotic by the time you get to ethanol. It may

even be a one-to-one ratio on the energy input and

the energy output. That is a stupid way of

managing this system.

Last point, last graph. One of the things that

we've got to do is to stabilize oil prices. This

is what oil prices look like, OK?

This is a very bad system because what happens is

your hurdle rate gets set very low. People come up

with really smart ideas for solar panels, or for

wind, or for something else, and then guess what?

The oil price goes through the floor. That company

goes out of business, and then you can bring the

oil price back up.

So if I had one closing and modest suggestion,

let's set a stable oil price in Europe and the

United States. How do you do that? Well, let's put

a tax on oil that is a non-revenue tax, and it

basically says for the next 20 years, the price of

oil will be -- whatever you want, 35 bucks, 40

bucks. If the OPEC price falls below that, we tax

it. If the OPEC price goes above that, the tax

goes away.

What does that do for entrepreneurs? What does it

do for companies? It tells people, if you can

produce energy for less than 35 bucks a barrel, or

less than 40 bucks a barrel, or less than 50 bucks

a barrel -- let's debate it -- you will have a

business. But let's not put people through this

cycle where it doesn't pay to research because

your company will go out of business as OPEC

drives alternatives and keeps bioenergy from

happening. Thank you.