LISTEN TO THE INTERVIEW

Tegan Wendland/WRKF Vadim Kochergin, Ph.D.

WENDLAND: What do you think made your application for this grant so strong?

KOCHERGIN: We think that the expertise that the LSU AgCenter and Louisiana-based scientific community has attracted the referees - they feel that we have enough expertise in the area, and also the fact that we're going to create and educational and extension group there and train specialists for the emerging biofuels industry. I think that's an important part of the grant.

WENDLAND: This was one of only five USDA grants that were awarded throughout the country, right?

KOCHERGIN: Yes. From what we understand this was the largest set of grants of this type ever awarded by the USDA. There are five grants and in the southern part of the United States are LSU and the LSU AgCenter and Tennessee University.

WENDLAND: What's your long-term goal?

KOCHERGIN: The duration of the grant is five years and the long-term goal is to make it sustainable to go beyond the five-year period and to operate the plant and fulfill its goals and provide syrup from the feedstock to the conversion partners - because there are many of them and there will be more coming on-board. We'll have a facility that will allow to get a non-proprietor feedstock available to those conversion partners. And who I call "conversion partners" are the companies that have the technology to convert simple sugars into biochemicals or biofuels or whatever products that we typically make out of oil.

WENDLAND: Okay, so can you kind of walk me through the process and make it clear as far as what you're actually doing, how you work with your partners and what you're actually doing there on-site?

KOCHERGIN: So, we have to grow the crop, then we have to bring the feedstock into the mill, into the processing facility and people familiar with the sugar mills can imagine the front end of a biorefinery will be more like a sugar mill. They take the feedstock, bring it to the factory and squeeze the juice out of it using milling equipment or diffusion - there are some technical terms - but generally it's just squeezing the juice out and rinsing the feedstock. After that, the sugars, not necessarily table sugar but the simple sugars, can be converted using different technologies to fuels and chemicals. And fuels, lets say gasoline, desiel, jet fuel, kerosene, ethanol of course - by the way, this grant specifically excludes ethanol. After we've made the juice out of this syrup, so we make the juice and convert it to syrup, the syrup is then transferred to the conversion partners, the technology owners and they will use those syrups to test their processes and see what else they need to do with this feedstock and how they need to purify it.

WENDLAND: They're doing the actual refining then?

KOCHERGIN: Yes. We'll have to have partners for that because we're too small of a group and it's too large of a task.

WENDLAND: What is the long-term goal? Is it to produce it commercially and sell it?

KOCHERGIN: Absolutely. The long-term goal is to use one of the most efficient agricultures in the world, which is our U.S. agriculture, to start filling-out the sector of biofuels and biochemicals. I don't believe that oil will ever be completely replaced, it's unrealistic, but at least finding a better and better niche, and also it will create jobs for America, and, also, raising the educational level. These new refineries require different kinds of specialists, and that's what we hope to create - the pilot facility that will be used as training.

WENDLAND: Would you say that this industry is indicative of the direction of Louisiana's future? That we're well-positioned for this kind of industry?

KOCHERGIN: Definitely. I think that Louisiana has huge potential because Louisiana has a huge forestry sector, a huge row crops, it has a gas and oil industry so it has the necessary infrastructure for biofuels distribution and marketing. So it's really a fantastic opportunity - the problem is that Louisiana does not really speak much about itself, it doesn't show off and on the nationwide market Louisiana attracts more and more attention right now and I think that's the idea is to try to bring more attention to the southeastern United States.