You have to go back a long way to trace the origins of Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center (GLBRC) researcher Bruce Dale’s passion for biofuels and renewable energy.
The son of a mining engineer, Dale came face to face with the finite nature of non-renewable resources at the age of twelve, an early encounter that put him in dogged pursuit of the biofuels research now bringing him both national and international recognition.
His most recent career highlights? President Obama’s February 7th tour of the pilot plant at Michigan State University based on Dale’s AFEXTM technology, as well as Dale’s inclusion – for the fourth year in a row – on an industry-generated list, the “Top 100 People in the Bioeconomy” for 2013-14.
Fourth-generation engineer Bruce Dale spent the early years of his childhood in the tiny mining town of Ruth, Nevada. At that time, the Kennecott Copper Corporation operated the large open pit copper mine that had first put the company town of Ruth on the map, employing not only Dale’s dad but nearly all of his friends’ parents too. With roughly 700 residents, it was the kind of place where everyone knew everyone and where Dale felt very much at home.
“It was in the mountains and it was beautiful,” Dale says of the place, “I loved it there.”
Dale’s father, a mining engineer for Kennecott, was in charge of developing the mine. He knew where the copper was and, more specifically, he knew where it was not. When Dale was twelve, his dad came home from work, gathered his family around the table, and told them it was time to leave: the copper mine was nearing its end.
“A year later, we were in Arizona at another copper mine,” Dale says, emphasizing the disruption the move represented to him. “And Dad was right. About seven years later that mine in Nevada closed. It had run out of mineable ore. The whole community, my beautiful little town, just disappeared.”
After high school, Dale went to the University of Arizona to study chemical engineering. In 1973, as he was heading into his senior year, Dale returned from serving as a missionary for his church in Mexico only to realize that the United States was in the midst of the first oil crisis to confront the nation in the 1970s. Since the largest employer of chemical engineers at that time was the oil industry, Dale decided he needed to change course.
“I realized I had committed myself to a field that was dominated by the oil companies. And oil is another non-renewable resource like copper, except that oil’s worse. You can recover and reuse copper. But when you use up oil it’s gone, and it won’t be back for hundreds of millions of years. Effectively, it’s gone from us forever. A way of life based on oil cannot last, just like my little mining town could not last,” he says.
Dale went on to pursue a doctorate at Purdue University in 1976, opting for a new field called biochemical engineering that would allow him to specialize in what was then called “renewable resources engineering.” It’s an endeavor he has stuck with ever since, having focused on developing sustainable biofuel technologies for the past thirty-eight years, a time period during which widespread doubt about the need for, or even the viability of, alternative renewable fuel resources very often prevailed.
The technology AFEXTM (or ammonia fiber expansion), which Dale began developing in 1980, is one of his signature achievements. AFEXTM is a pretreatment process that involves applying heat and ammonia to tough cellulosic biomass like corn leaves and stalks, resulting in a plant material that can be easily pelletized for transport and storage, and easily digested either by ruminants (for animal feed) or by enzymes to generate sugars for biofuel production. AFEXTM essentially takes what is already being produced – in this case agricultural residue – and breaks open the plant materials so that its sugars can be more readily accessed for either animal feed or biofuels. AFEXTM’s potential for environmental impact is great: 1 billion tons of pelletized AFEXTM biomass could replace 56 billion gallons of gasoline if used for biofuels, or provide 1.2 billion tons of milk if used to feed dairy cattle.
Though Dale invented the AFEXTM process, and has thus conducted a great deal of AFEXTM research at the laboratory scale, figuring out how to cheaply scale it up for use in industry remained a big challenge. MBI International, which is owned by the Michigan State University Research Foundation and specializes in de-risking and scaling-up bio-based technologies, licensed AFEXTM in 1995 and then developed a way to lower AFEXTM process costs by a factor of ten. In May of 2011, MBI received a U.S. Department of Energy grant to build a pilot plant to produce one ton of AFEX-treated biomass per day. Using this treated biomass, MBI researchers recently concluded a beef cattle feed trial to test the efficacy of AFEX-pretreated biomass as a ruminant animal feed, with very positive results.
The highest-ranked academic in Biofuels Digest’s “Top 100 People in the Bioeconomy,” Dale is serious about doing work that will not just drive the biofuels industry but will also move the energy industry forward in sustainable ways. When meeting with President Obama this month, Dale remained on message.
“I told him we didn’t have to choose between food and fuel, that we could have both. And that we can do it in a way that is environmentally sound.”
Dale believes that public opinion surrounding biofuels is currently being influenced by a shale gas boom – what he calls “oil mining” – and along with it the faulty notion that “natural gas will save us”, which is resulting in yet another “pause period” in people’s enthusiasm for the idea of biofuels.
And yet, Dale says, “In the not-so-long-term, we’re burning up oil infinitely faster than nature is forming it. And if we want to continue to have a relatively mobile society that runs on liquid fuels, the only long-term, renewable and potentially sustainable source of liquid fuels is biofuels. More and more, I think that’s being recognized.”
According to Dale, the task now at hand for researchers is to create the means of putting sustainably designed biofuel systems in place so that when biofuels do get used on a much larger scale, the systems will last indefinitely, stabilizing and perhaps reducing greenhouse gas levels, while also improving soil, water and air quality and enhancing biodiversity.
“We have to figure out how to do biofuels right, in all ways: economically, environmentally, and socially. And we have to do this on a very, very large scale,” Dale says. “The world uses about four billion tons of oil per year, so we have a lot of petroleum fuels to replace with sustainably produced biofuels. And it’s something we can do, but it won’t be easy. That’s why it’s so gratifying to be in the GLBRC and to be a part of this research. We can very literally change the world for the better now and in the future.”
Dale’s research is partially funded by the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center (GLBRC), one of three Department of Energy Bioenergy Research Centers created to make transformational breakthroughs that will form the foundation of new cellulosic biofuels technology. For more information on the GLBRC, visit www.glbrc.org.