Features
BP grant funds big science
Petroleum
giant BP PLC announced a $500 million grant to the U of I's Urbana campus,
the University of California at Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory
in a public-private partnership to unleash the promise of biotechnology
to cure the nation's addiction to oil.
Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich joined California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and Robert Malone, chairman and president of BP America, at a Berkeley news conference for the announcement that was also broadcast live on the Urbana campus on February 1.
The 10-year project will establish the Energy Bioscience Institute on both the Berkeley and Urbana campuses. The overall goal of the interdisciplinary, basic and applied scientific and engineering research project is to find ways to produce new and cleaner energy, principally for road transport.
The
U of I will contribute expertise in improving current biofuel production
and growing and extracting biofuels from promising crops such as perennial
herbaceous grasses. Previous support from the Illinois Council for Food
and Agricultural Research enabled U of I scientists to pioneer research
in the use of Miscanthus as a bioenergy crop. A portion of the $500 million
will come to the U of I, which will devote 340 acres of farmland to the
study and production of biofuel feedstock.
The U of I effort will be housed at the Institute for Genomic Biology and led by plant biology and crop sciences professor Stephen Long.
"Doing big science to solve large social problems is something public universities do well," said Richard Herman, Urbana chancellor. "We can and should be national leaders in alternative energy sources because we have both the natural resources and the human resources."
Governor Blagojevich called the U of I "the jewel of our university system" and said the BP project "will do for biofuels what NASA did for space in the Kennedy era."
BP will maintain up to 50 scientists, technologists and a management team on the two campuses.
Reporting by Diana Yates, Urbana News Bureau
Learn more>> News
Bureau release on the BP grant and on Miscanthus
grass