Alternative-Fuels Pioneer Receives First-Ever $100,000 Lemelson-MIT Award for Sustainability

Business Wire, April 2, 2007

Dartmouth College Engineering Professor and Mascoma co-founder Lee Lynd honored for 25 years of inventive achievements and research into alternative fuels

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Your car could soon become a vegetarian thanks to a process for cost-effectively converting cellulosic biomass, such as grass, wood, wheat and rice straw, into ethanol that can be used for fuel. When it does, it will be due to inventors such as Lee Lynd, professor of engineering and adjunct professor of biology at Dartmouth College, and co-founder of Mascoma Corp. Lynd received the inaugural $100,000 Lemelson-MIT Award for Sustainability today, which recognizes inventors whose products and processes enhance economic opportunity and community well-being, while protecting and restoring the natural environment.

Lynd and his colleagues' inventions are at the forefront of advanced technologies for converting biomass feedstocks into motor vehicle fuels. Lynd is being recognized for these inventions, as well as his vision and long-term advocacy of biofuels as a sustainable alternative to fossil fuels.

"Decades ago, Lee Lynd started doing something about global warming and the rapid depletion of the world's non-renewable energy resources," said Merton Flemings, director of the Lemelson-MIT Program. "He continued to experiment and pursue his ideas even when the conventional wisdom said they couldn't be done."

"Lee's groundbreaking research has driven forward the public policy debate, the business world, and the fundamental science of bioenergy," said Nathanael Greene, a senior policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council, and one of Lynd's nominators for the $100,000 Lemelson-MIT Award for Sustainability. "His work has helped frame our basic understanding of the sustainable potential for bioenergy and especially biofuels."

A 'Harebrained Idea' From a Compost Heap

In 1977, while an undergraduate biology major at Bates College, Lynd spent a summer working on an organic farm in North Reading, Massachusetts and was struck by how much heat a compost heap could generate. "I said, my goodness, that pile of grass and whatnot is four-feet high, and if you put a thermometer down into the bottom of that, it's 150 degrees Fahrenheit," he recalled.

At first, Lynd thought about using compost heaps as a source of heat. Although he soon realized that was not promising, the idea of using biology to produce energy stayed with him. "An initially harebrained idea can lead you to something worthwhile if you run with it for awhile," Lynd said.

As Lynd's vision for biofuels took shape in the late 70s, he realized that cellulose-utilizing bacteria that produced ethanol were known, and that production and utilization of cellulosic biofuels could involve a sustainable carbon cycle with no net emissions of carbon dioxide. These initial insights have served him well over several decades of continuous focused effort, during much of which the world showed little enthusiasm for renewable fuels. "I think the thing that served me the best is clarity of purpose," he explained. "For decades when biofuels were not popular, I thought the topic was exciting and important, and so I worked on it anyway."

Step-by-Step Progress Toward a Big Idea

In the United States today, fuel ethanol is derived from corn, which is available in limited quantities and consumes substantial amounts of fossil energy as currently produced. "On the other hand," Lynd observed, "cellulose is the most abundant organic compound on the face of the Earth and production of fuel from cellulosic biomass displaces far more fossil fuel than is required to produce it."

Lynd has identified one-step fermentation of cellulosic biomass into ethanol or other biofuels--a process configuration known as consolidated bioprocessing (CBP)--as a potentially transformative breakthrough for low-cost processing. While the vast majority of research on processing cellulosic biomass has focused on separately-produced enzymes used in multi-step biological processing, Lynd's group is the most active worldwide in research on the one-step, CBP approach.

"Developing a microbe that can convert cellulosic biomass to ethanol can be approached in one of two ways," said Lynd. "Either start with organisms that are able to grow well on biomass and modify them to produce ethanol better, or start with organisms that produce ethanol well and modify them so that they can grow on biomass." Lynd's group is investigating both approaches. His group has recently engineered thermophilic bacteria - similar to those present in the compost heap that captured his imagination years before - to produce ethanol as the only fermentation product. Working in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa, the group has also engineered yeast to grow on cellulose.

"Originally, we were motivated to look at CBP by process engineering considerations - fewer tanks and fewer process steps," said Lynd. "However, as we have learned more about how microorganisms utilize cellulose, we are finding additional, biological, advantages to the CBP strategy."