"Then when oil prices changed, the research emphasis changed," Blanch said. "It's kind of interesting now to see it resurfacing with perhaps much more commitment to making it work."
That commitment is strong at the University of California, which is becoming the nation's scientific crossroads in the push to exploit plant sources for cheap, cleaner-burning alternatives to fossil-based liquid fuels.
Centered at UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the biofuels push is growing into a full-fledged campaign: When the more than $50 million-a-year public and private effort is fully funded by 2008, some 350 scientists will be attacking the problem, the largest such group in the United States.
If they're successful, within five years cars and trucks will have cost-competitive biofuels to burn in their tanks instead of only gasoline and expensive grain-based ethanol. Aircraft will fly on high-energy biofuels distilled from plant cellulose rather than only fossil distillates.
Berkeley Lab Director Steven Chu's Helios Project is the framework for marshaling $1 billion in public and private resources for breakthrough science on liquid fuels and solar electricity.
Of the 350 scientists now funded in the Berkeley-centered effort, 200 will be in the Energy Biosciences Institute backed by BP and hosted by UC Berkeley, Berkeley Lab and the University of Illinois.
The other 150 will work under UC Berkeley chemical and bioengineering professor Jay Keasling at the U.S. Energy Department's newly formed $125 million Joint BioEnergy Institute, which includes Berkeley Lab, UC Berkeley, UC Davis, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories and Stanford University.
Blanch, the venture's chief science and technology officer, said small economic gains at each step in the process will add up to enough savings to bring a gallon of cellulose-based fuel in line with the cost of a gallon of gas at the pump by 2012, meeting a goal set by President Bush.
JBEI's task includes developing a renewable carbon pool to compete with the non-renewable pool of underground fossil fuels. The most exciting research focuses on perennial crops grown for their cellulose.
But the cellulose pool is of little value against global warming unless it can be cheaply broken down chemically. This process, called deconstruction, presents JBEI scientists with their biggest test: turbo-charging enzymes to dissolve plant cell walls into fermentable sugars. Much has changed since Blanch first worked on cellulosic biofuels in the 1970s, but deconstruction remains a daunting hurdle. The young scientists and students he works with at the university have a strong motivation for conquering those hurdles this time around.
"They're more involved in this than the old generation," Blanch said. "They'll have to deal with a hot planet long after we're gone."