Students Experience Bioenergy from the Ground Up

Interns working at the Bioenergy Field School. Photo courtesy of Ann Wilkie.

By Yelena Granovskaya and Kyle Fricker, Environmental Science

Last summer, a unique group of undergraduate students gathered everyday under the hot sun at the Energy Research and Education Park. They worked hard, flexing their intellectual and physical muscles, striving to learn everything they could under the mentorship of bioenergy expert Dr. Ann C. Wilkie. The students came from diverse backgrounds and enhanced their knowledge with cross-disciplinary learning in the BioEnergy Summer School (BESS).

The school was launched in the summer of 2006 when Dr. Wilkie recognized the lack of undergraduate programs addressing bioenergy on campus. The field of bioenergy has evolved to become a prominent area of research, driven by an increasing awareness of sustainability and the need for renewable fuels. Being a strong believer in experiential, hands-on, outside-of-the-classroom learning, Dr. Wilkie has spearheaded this bioenergy program with sponsorship from the Office of the IFAS Dean for Research.

Throughout the summer, the bioenergy interns not only gained scientific knowledge but also met with experts in the field, reviewed literature pertaining to bioenergy and sustainability, and made several field trips to bioenergy sites and conferences. The interns also had the opportunity to work on individual and group projects. These projects spotlighted innovative and practical applications of bioenergy research and the experiences gained by the interns were invaluable.

The field trips included visits to a local biodiesel co-op (Alachua Biodiesel Company), Dr. Wilkie's fixed-film anaerobic biodigester at the UF/IFAS Dairy Unit, UF's Motor Pool, and the Gum Slough spring system. The interns also had the opportunity to attend the 2008 Florida Farm to Fuel Summit and the GRU Annual Green Building Symposium hearing speakers like Governor Charlie Crist and Gainesville Mayor Pegeen Hanrahan discuss biofuels and energy efficiency. All day trips, guest speakers, and conferences were followed with reflections and debates on sustainability and bioenergy issues.

With the focus of the research on bioenergy, the interns wanted to apply their academic and theoretical knowledge of sustainability in practical projects. Working together, the interns planted and maintained an energy garden. By growing bioenergy crops, the interns were able to educate themselves on the viability and versatility of biomass available for fuel production. The energy garden was divided into plots for oil, sugar and fiber crops, to be used for biodiesel, bioethanol and syngas (gasification), respectively.

The students experimented with unique energy crops such as Sweet Potatoes, Napiergrass and Jatropha curcas. A few interns were fortunate enough to spend a day with a sweet potato breeder, Dr. Janice Ryan-Bohac, who is currently working on developing a highly productive energy sweet potato for ethanol production. Sweet potatoes, being perennials, are low maintenance and extremely productive. The breeders'goals are to develop a sweet potato cultivar that is rich in carbohydrates, potentially making sweet potatoes the most productive and efficient choice for ethanol production. Napiergrass, Pennisetum purpureum, is a highly productive perennial grass that grows to about five meters tall. Napiergrass yields thirty tons per hectare and can be harvested as a feedstock for cellulosic ethanol production or for gasification into syngas. The interns were especially interested in Jatropha curcas, a perennial plant that thrives in arid areas and has a seed oil content of up to forty percent. Unfortunately, the students faced a challenge in getting the seeds to sprout and throughout the summer they experimented with several germination methods, but were not able to grow any plants.

Yelena Granovskaya harvests sunflowers at the BioEnergy School. Photo courtesy of Ann Wilkie.

The interns also collectively cultivated an organic food garden juxtaposed to the energy garden, and pondered the debate of "food versus fuel". Gardening offered a demonstration of the relative ease with which people can live more sustainably and efficiently. "Locavores", the Oxford Dictionary's word of the year for 2007, are people committed to eating foods grown locally. In today's global markets, many foods purchased from supermarkets are packed and shipped from around the world at a high natural resource expense. Eating local foods is much more sustainable; communities need to work together to reduce their dependence on imported goods and the associated strain on natural resources. The interns grew tomatoes, zucchini, sweet potatoes, okra, cucumbers, green peppers, and squash over the summer months using organic methods. The experience gained from growing an organic garden opened the interns' minds to small-scale gardening, and the importance of implementing local, seasonal agriculture into sustainable community living. The interns donated nearly all of their harvested produce to the St. Francis House, a shelter for the homeless, in downtown Gainesville.

Each intern was also assigned an individual project that involved methods of creating biofuels. One of the interns, Kyle Fricker, a chemical engineering senior, was eager to learn about brewing biodiesel as well as expirementing with different methods for biodiesel production. Kyle spent numerous days in the lab experimenting with biodiesel formation using ethanol as an alternative transesterification reagent. Currently, methanol is the commonly used reagent in biodiesel production. Methanol is produced industrially from natural gas; thus biodiesel produced using it is not entirely renewable or "green". In the end, Kyle successfully made biodiesel batches from various grades of ethanol, a remarkable success. Kyle was further involved with different projects ranging from an energy balance on the biodiesel production process to a rainwater irrigation system for the food garden.

From day one, Jon Alldridge, an agricultural and biological engineering senior, was keen to learn as much as he could about algae. Jon's experimentation aimed to find optimal algae growing conditions. His project focused on testing different conditions for surfaces on which algae can grow, and showed the converging effects of surface angle and water stream velocity on algae growth and productivity. His interests went beyond the growth of algae to bioprospecting indigenous algae strains for their biofuel potential. Jon led the interns on a trip to the Gum Slough spring system where they sampled several native algal strains and later analyzed them in the lab.

Yelena Granovskaya, an environmental science junior, was interested in all aspects of sustainability. Her focus in the BioEnergy School consisted of experimenting with energy crops and designing a small-scale oil press. Small-scale oil extraction for biofuel operations is uncommon but, if implemented in a local, practical manner, it may become a key to community biodiesel operations. Yelena focused her energy on designing an oil press which would be easy to build and economic in material cost. Her design uses minimal materials, consisting of a metal frame with a hydraulic bottle jack attached, a wooden piston operated by the jack, and a perforated plastic cylinder.

The third annual BioEnergy Summer School has been more than a success. This group of young individuals ended their summer knowing that they had become a conduit for change by exploring sustainability in their lives and becoming a model for others. Through the failures and successes of experimentation, the interns learned how to create real-world solutions for broad and complex problems, leaving the school a little more "biofueled", than "biofooled".

For information regarding the 2009 UF/IFAS Bioenergy Research Summer Internship Contact:
Dr. Ann C. Wilkie
Soil and Water Science Department
University of Florida-IFAS
352-392-8699, acwilkie@ufl.edu

For more information regarding the 2008 experience, visit the Bioenergy Internship website at http://biogas.ifas.ufl.edu/Internship, or contact Yelena Granovskaya, (yelena@ufl.edu) or Kyle Fricker (kylfri@ufl.edu).