Michael Pacheco runs the third-largest brewery in Colorado – but he doesn’t make beer. He takes cornstalks and bark and turns them into fuel for an automobile.
Nearby, John Rugh is trying to cool down a dummy named Adam, who sweats distilled water while sitting in a Dodge Neon heated to 120 degrees Fahrenheit by banks of lights.
Both efforts are part of the Golden-based National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s attempt to change how much and what type of energy Americans use.
Tuesday, President Bush is coming to the NREL – the country’s premier alternative-energy lab – three weeks after saying in his State of the Union address that the nation is “addicted to oil.”
“It’s one of the few places on the planet where you have scientists brought together in all aspects of renewable energy,” said Scott Sklar, president of the Stella Group, an energy consulting group in Washington. “It’s everything from an idea factory to actual application in the market.”
Still, the NREL’s budget dropped $22.5 million this year and was set to fall another $11 million next year. Two weeks ago, 32 people were laid off.
But Sunday, the Department of Energy announced those jobs were restored, effective immediately, by shifting unused funds from other accounts.
And the president is arriving with a revised budget that will boost the lab’s funding by $15 million as part of his Advanced Energy Initiative.
Funding for biofuels – for which Pacheco brews his cornstalk fuel – is targeted to double to $27.5 million from its current level.
Meanwhile, the hybrid-car lab – home of Adam, the sweating dummy – is looking at a cut of almost 40 percent for the next fiscal year.
It’s a tale of two labs – both doing cutting-edge research but only one getting new money.
The NREL began operating in 1977 and has 900 employees, including 600 scientists, working in eight major research labs on a 327-acre campus off Interstate 70.
The lab is home to national centers for bioenergy, wind technology and photovoltaics, which convert sunlight to electricity.
When Rugh, 42, enters the advanced-vehicle lab, where Adam the dummy sits in the Dodge Neon, he dons sunglasses to deflect the rays of the halide floodlights baking the passenger compartment.
Rugh’s goal is to figure out how to better cool that compartment and stop Adam – the Advanced Automotive Mannequin – from sweating.
“We get the question: Why are we working on air conditioning?” Rugh says. “President Bush spoke of reducing reliance on foreign oil. That’s what we’re working on.”
The 237 million cars in the United States use 7 billion gallons of fuel a year for air conditioning. That’s 9.5 percent of foreign oil imports.
Air conditioning reduces fuel economy by 20 percent in conventional cars, Rugh says. So scientists are trying to harness heat from the engine and exhaust to produce cooling and reduce fuel devoted to air conditioning by 75 percent.
The lab is also working on fuel- cell vehicles and plug-in hybrid cars that can be recharged in your garage at night.
NREL scientists working with automakers helped bring today’s 420,000 hybrids to the road beginning in 1999.
Scientists in the vehicle-technologies lab declined to comment on the impact of the projected 38 percent cut in funding.
“Science is a long-term effort,” NREL spokesman George Douglas said, “and the uncertainty of funding is not the best way to go about it.”
The bioenergy lab will fare much better under Bush’s proposal.
Pacheco brews ethanol in 2,300- gallon tanks at the National Bioenergy Center’s two-story, $10 million refinery, which uses corn husks, wheat straw, sawdust and other agricultural wastes.
“The process is similar to making beer. Instead of hops and grains, we use nonedible biomass,” says Pacheco, 49, director of the center.
Scientists cultivate yeast to ferment the concoction into fuel-grade ethanol. The brew is the second generation of bioethanol fuel and doesn’t compete for the nation’s corn supply.
“All the research is nonedible biomass, so we avoid the fuel-versus- food competition,” Pacheco says.
Today, about 100 plants around the nation make ethanol from corn kernels, consuming 13 percent of the U.S. corn crop to produce 3 percent of the fuel supply, Pacheco says.
Bush is proposing that 30 percent to 40 percent of the nation’s fuel should come from ethanol and plans to double NREL biomass funds to make it happen.
“Ethanol really is a good way to reduce the dependence on foreign oil,” Pacheco says. “That’s why the president is getting behind it.”
Critics question whether the energy savings from biofuel outweigh the energy spent in collection, storage, transportation and production.
The NREL says the return on corn ethanol against energy spent is 40 percent, a finding similar to a Department of Agriculture study’s.
It costs $2.50 a gallon to make ethanol from biomass. Pacheco’s goal is to reduce the cost in five years to less than $1.10 – the cost to make corn ethanol.
“We’re close to the finish line,” Pacheco says. “We’ll have it out the door and commercialized in five years.”
Staff writer Dave Curtin can be reached at 303-820-1276 or dcurtin@denverpost.com.
Bush’s energy push
Today: President Bush arrives in Colorado late this afternoon as part of a mission to tout alternative energy sources. He begins the day with a speech in Milwaukee, then tours a solar-energy plant in Auburn Hills, Mich.
Tuesday: Bush visits the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden.
