**INTRODUCTION: MR. SWISHER**

Our next speaker is Dr. Raymond L. Orbach. Dr. Orbach was sworn in by
Secretary Samuel Bodman as the Department of Energy's first Under
Secretary for Science, on June 1, 2006. As Under Secretary for Science,
Dr. Orbach serves as the Secretary's advisor on science policy, as well
as on the scientific aspects of everything that the Department of Energy
does. Dr. Orbach is responsible for planning, coordinating and
overseeing the Energy Department\'s R & D Programs and its seventeen
national laboratories with their immense capabilities, as well as the
department\'s scientific and engineering education activity. Please join
me in welcoming Dr. Raymond Lee Orbach.

**[REMARKS BY UNDER SECRETARY]{.underline}**

**[OF SCIENCE, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY]{.underline}**

**DR. RAYMOND L. ORBACH**

It's my great pleasure to be here this morning. I would like to thank
Secretaries Bodman and Johanns for inviting me. It's very exciting to
see energy bringing together the Department of Energy and the Department
of Agriculture. It's a relationship that I believe will benefit our
nation and our world and I am very proud to be a part of it.

Matt Simmons this morning, I think, said it all, *\"If we don't do R & D
and look onto other alternative sources of energy, we're at the edge of
a cliff."* And my purpose today, is to talk about one approach to the
edge moving away to moving the clock hands back in time, to bringing the
United States closer to energy security. It is an initiative that the
Department of Energy announced on the second of August, and my purpose
today is to go through some of the nature of that initiative and explain
and hopefully, encourage all of you, to become participants.

What we are trying to do is to mimic what nature does so well. Nature
has had two billion years on us to develop these processes. We're hoping
that with modern technology and with the best minds that we have in this
country, that in a matter of five years we can make a significant
difference.

The initiative calls for using systems biology to develop new fuels,
cellulose to ethanol, solar to fuels, the initiative is open all ideas
to produce fuels for transportation, for heating and other purposes in
our country.

One example is that what you see before you, which is cellulose to
ethanol, about which we've heard a great deal at this meeting. The
problem that we have is in the first step, getting from the
lignocellulosic material through the sugars or starches, but then we can
ferment into ethanol. It has enormous promise for the United States. A
workshop that we ran last December showed that we have approximately a
billion tons of biomass available, without affecting the food crops in
the United States. About 55 million acres of perennial bioenergy crops
would give us enough fuel, 60 billion gallons, to replace roughly 30
percent of the transportation fuels that we use today. As you heard from
Mr. Khosla, that may be a conservative estimate.

We are talking about a variety of biomass materials: switchgrass,
kaffee, willows and the Poplar Tree. It's really remarkable to see how
nature does it. Microbes compose about 50 percent of the biomass of this
earth and about 80 percent of the surface area of living things. They do
remarkable results.

Pictured on your left is a scourge of those of us who live in
termite-infested regions. That little machine is very efficient, it
takes the cellulose in our wood and converts it into energy and uses a
complex system of microbes in its gut, in order to perform that
transition. It's not a single gene, it's not a single metabolic pathway
it's a complex interaction of microbial forces that enable this
particular insect to work so well. What we want to do is to take
advantage of the processes that that particular bug uses to produce
energy.

So in DOE we're trying to do as I said, in five years, what nature's
done in two billion. We're putting a quarter of a billion dollars on the
table and we are putting forward a request for proposals in the broadest
possible sense, a funding opportunity announcement, which will generate
two cooperative agreements for new bioenergy centers. The purpose of
these centers can be likened to a start-up company, where the risk
capital is simply too high for the private sector to invest. So you have
to think of this as the government starting a start-up company whose
purpose is to use systems biology to produce fuels. We want a system
that will look at both ends of the spectrum, that will analyze the
metabolic pathways in microbial bioconversion processes, but also, that
will understand the cell wall and their assembly. When Secretary Bodman
spoke, he talked about tuning the biomass to the microbes. So this is
truly a joint effort between the Department of Energy and the Department
of Agriculture. Both ends have great promise and need to be joined.

Looking at microbes, we need to understand the metabolic pathway. We
need to understand the complex interaction of the genes leading to
proteins and the enzymes that produce the ability to breakdown the
cellulose and hemicellulose and get around the lignins that are barriers
to the enzymes for their actions. Nature knows how to do it and we need
to discover those pathways that we can then do synthetically and tailor
to our mission.

The plant size is as interesting as the microbial. The purpose is to
optimize the biomass opportunities that nature can provide and that we
can tweak in order to achieve our goals. It's interesting to compare
food crops with energy crops. Food crops as you all know have been
optimized over the better part of the century and the production as
you've heard, is truly remarkable. But we have not done the same for
bioenergy. We need now to go in the same path that we have for food, for
energy. We need to enhance crop yield. We need to reduce the inputs
required for growth. We have to ensure sustainability of perennials and
we have to optimize for fuel production.

Now, we have just sequenced at our Joint Genome Institute, the Poplar
tree, a very rapidly growing opportunity for biomass. One should just
think of a plantation of suitably gnomically modified crops in the
presence of a facility that would take advantage of that biomass,
convert to sugars or starches and then go through the process leading to
fuel. That second step is also feasible through microbial systems. So we
are looking at both sides of the energy production spectrum.

I announce today, 4 million dollars to add to the 5.7 million dollars
last year in a joint effort by the Department of Energy and the
Department of Agriculture to address the issue of food crops and how we
can optimize those crops for energy purposes.

One example of the first series of awards is using chips with
carbohydrates on the nodes of the chip and then testing which enzymes
interact more effectively with different carbohydrates. This is the way
we handle genes on a chip. And for the first time, we are doing this
now; it\'s the first phase for carbohydrates, to understand the
interaction between the enzymes and carbohydrates in plants. It's
another example of how technology can shorten the time and give us
opportunities to produce biofuels.

Our country has a large capacity for biomass, but it's different, in
different parts of the country. And part of the optimization that I was
speaking of needs to be local, it needs to be focused on the nature of
the plants that can be grown in different area in our country. And this
will lead to new systems biology appropriate to that particular part of
the country. So you need to think of this as a regional focus.

The opportunities here for us are enormous, but they're also terribly
important for the world. We have many parts of the world where
agriculture is unable to compete for food crops with other countries and
where the cost of fuel is prohibitive. If these countries could develop
their own biomass products that could be converted into fuel,
efficiently and quickly and locally, with modest investments for the
equivalent our factories to produce ethanol, their economy would
flourish. So, one must think of this not only for our own energy needs,
but also on an international scale.

In summary, the DOA Bioenergy Initiative provides 250 million dollars
over five years, for two bioenergy centers or roughly, 25 million
dollars a year, per center. That's about the typical cost of a start-up
with roughly a hundred employees. We are encouraging collaboration
between interested parties. It can be private sector, it can be
university, it can be laboratory, it can be non-profit; we are not
designing the nature of the collaboration. It is entirely up to those
who are making the proposals. It is an open competition there are no
biases in terms of who is involved in the proposals. We are going to use
leased space in order to speed up the process. We will make use of
existing facilities at DOE complexes, our Sequencing Facility our light
sources, and of course, the private sector that can produce the proteins
that will be necessary for understanding the metabolic pathways. The
timetable is one that should give interested parties enough time to put
together very exciting proposals. And we are looking forward on the
first of February to receiving them and making awards by roughly, May of
this year.

The stakes are very high. We need to optimize the crops and the
microbial processes that will turn the biomass into the fuels that our
country and our world needs. Thanks you.

**CONCLUSION: MR. SWISHER**

Well you know economics matters in the energy industries. And reducing
the costs of all of our renewable technologies is the mission of the
National Laboratories. I am, of course, familiar with the National
Energy Renewable Laboratory and I know how much the crack team Dan
Arvizu has at NREL has meant to the progress that winds have made in the
market. We cannot afford to back away from the importance of technology
development if we want our entire renewable energy family to prosper and
grow in the energy markets of the future. And even as a technology like
wind begins to mature, the importance of technology development does not
diminish a bit. So thank you, Dr. Orbach.