BIOMASS HUB

Earlier this month, scientists ventured to sea to find the next big biofuel breakthrough…gribbles.  The tiny crustaceans, which resemble pink woodlice, are a pest in the seafaring community gaining notoriety by munching through the hulls of wooden ships and bringing down piers.

Research into second generation biofuels that circumvent the food v. fuel and indirect land use change debates has caught fire in the last few years, and the tiny gribble has a potentially giant role to play.

Research into biofuels in the UK is backed by the Government’s Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), which has allocated £27 million for researching and creating a second generation of biofuels.  As part of the effort, a team of British researchers from the University of York and University of Portsmouth has learned that gribble have a gift for digesting wood not seen in any other animal.

Enzymes in the gribble’s digestive tract, it turns out, are able to break down woody cellulose and turn it into energy-rich sugars.  Researchers plan to mimic how the gribble digests the wood by creating a synthetic replica.

For biofuels, this means converting tough lignocellulosic wood and straw into liquid biofuel, the kind of stuff we can’t eat and grows in abundance.  Theoretically, a gribble-like processing plant could make sugars from woody raw material that can be fermented into alcohol-based fuels for transportation.

Putting the Gribble in Context

Joshua Kagan writes on Greentech Media:

While the discovery of this worm is novel, the idea of using an organism to produce enzymes that breakdown C5 and C6 sugars is not.  Advanced pioneers like Mascoma, Amyris, LS9, and Qteros are pursuing microbes that enable saccharification and fermentation to occur simultaneously.  Whether the Gribble worm’s process is scalable is another issue, but such minor details do not seem to make it into the hyperbolic press releases announcing these ‘discoveries.’

Within the race for advanced biofuels, new conversion discoveries are key to moving away from first generation biofuel feedstocks like corn, soy, and palm oil.  Processes are constantly undergoing refinement and experimentation to enhance efficiencies and reduce costs, and the pink gribble represents another weapon in the second generation arsenal.  The challenge to achieve cost parity with petroleum fuels while scaling production sustainably is significant, but not insurmountable as the gribble may one day prove.

More on the study is available in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.