A team of University researchers – funded by the state through the Traditional Industries program – developed a method for turning biomass waste, such as dead trees and paper pulp, into a liquid fuel to power diesel engines.

The team, led by Tom Adams with co-inventors Dan Geller, Joshua Pendergrass and Manuel Garcia-Perez, has licensed the method to California-based energy company, Tolero Energy, LLC.

“It’s a huge market,” Chris Churchill, Tolero CEO, said in a phone interview Wednesday, “and if the technology is successful, then there are a lot of opportunities.”

The grant given to the team was originally intended to find a way to develop wood chips, fibers and other materials into a liquid diesel fuel.

“What we’re looking at is taking waste products and feasibly converting that into a liquid fuel that will be mixed with diesel fuel,” said Geller, a public service assistant in the department of biological and agricultural engineering.

The procedure will take decaying trees from tree farms and pulp waste from paper plants, and convert it into an environmentally sustainable form of energy.

“We can start replacing imported diesel fuel with domestically produced diesel fuel,” Geller said.

For more than 50 years, Georgia has grown and cultivated “tree farms” with the sole intent of producing pulp.

“There are trees that are left to rot in the field,” Geller said, “and we can take that, process it and convert it into a biofuel as well.”

But what’s the downside?

“I’ve been referring to this as a fuel extender,” Geller said. “This wasn’t ever intended to replace petroleum diesel, but what I think we can look toward is to extend our supply of diesel fuel.”

According to Geller, a byproduct of the fuel is solid char, which can be used to reimburse the soil. This adds carbon back to the soil, providing much needed nutrients.

Some worry this fuel will end up causing damage by removing the decaying trees on the forest floor, which would otherwise be decomposed and recycled as nutrients into the soil by detrivores – organisms that feed on dead and decaying matter.

The removal of these trees and essential nutrients to the ecosystem reduces the amount of nutrients, thereby constraining the types of organisms that can live there through a process called habitat simplification.

However, Geller disagrees.

“When you look at it environmentally, I think people look at it in a slightly askew way,” he said. “It’s not exactly, ‘We go in there and clear cut these trees and there’s no forest left.’”

Geller said that since these forests are bred with the sole purpose of harvesting trees for pulp, the process of taking those decaying trees won’t affect the diversity of the ecosystem any further.

Regardless of ecological debates, “you have to make it before you can sell it,” Churchill said.

He said the company focuses on ways to get the product distributed, including maintaining facilities that produce the product, sublicensing to other companies and strategic partnerships.

“At the end of the day, you have to get it to the gas tank of the consumer,” he said, “so it’ll go into standard fuel distributions.”

According to Churchill, Tolero plans to create a completed product by early 2010, and though the company has only been in association with the University since 2009, it has high hopes.

However, this may not be affecting consumer gas prices just yet. The U.S. alone uses 200 billion gallons of liquid transportation fuel a year, he said.

“We’re a drop in the bucket at this point,” Churchill said. “It would take years for us to build up the infrastructure to really affect that.”

Churchill declined to comment on the monetary agreements between Tolero and the University, however, he said he is pleased with the progress the two have made.

“We’ve really enjoyed working with UGA,” he said, “and we look forward to continue working with them to develop more technologies like this.”