DOE ARPA-E Funds Wild Ideas

Morning Edition:

I mean let me give you an example of the type of things that we would fund. When you think about fuels, ARPA-E took the whole idea of biofuels and kind of turned it on its ear and said OK, well, plants have been trying to be plants for millions of years. Suppose you thought about this differently and said, could a plant be designed to be something that was more fuel-like? So could you take loblolly pines, which grow all over the southeast of the United States - and they actually make a component today, it's called a terpene. It's a molecule that is very close to the type of molecules that are in fuel. And so you could envision that the crop from these trees would be of a type of fuel.
MONTAGNE: And so you try to grow a lot more of them?
MARTIN: What this is actually saying that the tree itself, so you think about when you have, you know, maple syrup - you tap the tree and you get the syrup out to make syrup - this would be actually a fuel component that you could extract from the tree to be the fuel itself.
Another example, is the idea that algae produce really nice oils, and people like to think about them for fuels. We've looked at taking those traits and having them in tobacco plants. So could you have the good properties of algae in a tobacco plant, which we know how to grow on poor soil?
MONTAGNE: So ARPA-E is like DARPA in that its purpose is sort of big think.
MARTIN: What we think about picking projects, it's not does it work? We asked if it works, will it matter. So we actually really take risks, saying if it works it's going to really change the game.
MONTAGNE: You know, I wonder if there is less impetus, now, for what you're doing now that the U.S. is producing so much more oil and gas.
MARTIN: We look at it as creating more opportunities. So we actually just ran a project called MOVE(ph), which is trying to envision natural gas as a fuel for passenger vehicles, could you develop new tank designs for the car as well as compressor designs that would work at home.

That kind of stuff is just so far beyond where I would think about going.