Bioenergy Research Centers Set Up To Help Curb Oil Addiction

Dream teams of scientists at three locations in the U.S. will dive into work shortly on the tough problems of converting natural materials to energy at three new U.S. Department of Energy Bioenergy Research Centers. The centers were announced here on Tuesday.

The centers will work on breeding new varieties of bioenergy plants and will integrate new technologies, including genomics and new computational methods, into bioenergy research, among other things.

"These centers will provide the transformational science needed for bioenergy breakthroughs to advance President Bush's goal of making cellulosic ethanol cost-competitive with gasoline by 2012 and assist in reducing America's gasoline consumption by 20 percent in 10 years," said Secretary of Energy Samuel W. Bodman.

Michigan State University will partner with the University of Wisconsin-Madison in setting up the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center in Madison. The other two centers are in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, led by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and near Berkeley, California, led by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.