As gas prices rise and fall, only to rise again, Anne Tazewell has seen — and heard — an increase in those who have begun to invest interest in alternative fuels.

It wasn’t like that in 2005.

Tazewell, the alternative energy fuels manager for the Solar Center who is also involved with the the University’s Clean Transportation Program, said it was difficult to get funding for alternative energy projects before 2006.

But that year, the Clean Transportation Program received $2 million in funding from the North Carolina Department of Transportation, the Division of Air Quality and the State Energy Office.

It’s money that is going toward 30 different projects across the state, including one that is providing $45,000 to the Facilities Department to fuel University vehicles with an E-85 and gasoline fuel blend.

That $2 million was a “big step forward” from previous years’ funding. Before that, Tazewell said the program had only received about $150,000 from the State Energy Office.

Nicholas George, a project coordinator at the Solar Center, said that increase in attention is partially a response to the increase in gas prices.

“High gas prices generate a lot interest in biofuels,” he said. “In the 70s, they were looking at biofuels. As gas became cheaper, that interest died away. But in the past four to five years, interest is growing again, and the capacity for biofuel production has increased 150-fold.”

Although there is interest out there, Tazewell said funding for future programs — the program’s latest funding was to last them three years and into spring of 2009 — is questionable.

“It’s not clear if we’re going to get additional funding from the DOT,” she said. “I would have expected and hoped it would be easier to get funding the second time around.”

But researchers at the Solar Center, and in laboratories and classrooms throughout campus, are working toward one main goal: to produce alternative energy that can fully or partially replace the United States’ dependency on fossil fuel-based oil.

What they’re doingGeorge said he is trying to accomplish this goal through an energy crops project that looks into alternative possibilities like switchgrass and crop waste. He said he is mainly working with one crop in particular — canola oil — because a transition from one oil-based fuel to another will be more simple and, in turn, more realistic than expecting drivers to switch from oil-based energy to electric energy.

“As with a lot of biofuel crops, the technology to use them doesn’t really exist yet,” he said. “The market for them doesn’t exist yet.”

He used switchgrass, a cellulosic biofuel, as an example. Cellulosic biofuels are produced from wood, grass and other plants.

The technology to mass produce switchgrass-based biofuels doesn’t exist, he said, so there is no incentive for people to grow the crop or invest funds into this second-generation fuel’s production.

There are already places that produce biodiesel — the fuel that results from adding alcohol to a vegetable oil — in North Carolina. One is located in the Blue Ridge mountains, another in Cape Fear.

And it’s easy to make.

“The biodiesel production technology is relatively straightforward,” George said. “It’s a chemical process. You can make biodiesel on a kitchen bench with a couple of glass jars if you feel like it.”

Access to the ingredients that compose canola oil-based fuel is readily available as well, he said.

“Oil seed crops, like canola oil, are already widely grown around the world,” George said. “Not so much in the Southeastern United States, but it’s one of the most important crops in the world in terms of amount produced. Canada produces it, Australia produces it. Canola has a lot of potential.”

He said it would be simple to introduce the crop into North Carolina.

“You don’t need to buy new tractors,” George said. “You use the same equipment to produce wheat.” Not ‘without their problems’Producing alternative energy, especially the kind of energy is only accessible using new or nonexistent technologies, is not going to bring an instantaneous end to high gasoline prices.

“In the past few decades, we’ve been used to cheap energy. At the moment, we can produce biofuels at almost the same price as regular diesel. We can produce ethanol at the same price as gasoline,” George said. “But with biofuels, the production technologies are tied up with fossil fuels.”

So although farmers and researchers have access to various forms of alternative energy, the transition won’t be immediate. To produce a crop of canola oil, for example, farmers still have to use gasoline to fuel tractors, natural gas to produce fertilizer and diesel to operate trucks that transport the crop.

It’s only natural that with a rise in the price of oil comes a rise in the price of biodiesel, making it almost impossible to produce alternative fuel that would be cheaper than fossil fuels.

“We haven’t been able to decouple these things,” George said.

Another problem with fuels like canola oil comes with the amount of oil it would take to satiate the American driving population. Although farmers would be able to make their own canola-based biodiesel on their farms and use that to fuel their machinery, they wouldn’t be able to conceivably produce enough.

“You wouldn’t be able to meet the gas and fuel requirements of the United States with corn and ethanol and soybeans and canola,” George said. “It’d be impossible. We’d need to plant the whole of the United States with corn.”

If the 500,000 acres of winterwheat in North Carolina were replaced with canola plants, George said farmers would be able to grow enough of the crop to produce tens of millions of gallons of canola-based energy.

“Then you have to look at how much diesel you could displace with that. You’d only be able to displace about 4 percent of diesel consumption. You’d have to have a massive amount of canola to change all of it.”

Richard Kearney, a professor of political science, said there’s another drawback to fuel produced from crops he said have other, more important uses.

“It seems obscene to burn food — to use corn and soybeans and other food crops — to run SUVs,” he said. “There’s something profoundly wrong with that, when so many people around the world are starving. This corn could be used to lift people above starvation level.”

He said, however, that canola oil is easily replaceable with other vegetable oils, and wouldn’t make a large impact on the food market.

What researchers should turn to, he said, are second generation biofuels like switchgrass and forestry waste, which can produce enough energy to displace dependency on gasoline but do not come from food crops.

But there isn’t the technology to do so.

With technology, jobs will comeIn an economy where 6.1 percent of the available work force have either not found or are out of jobs, Kearney said alternative energy is one sector that will be able to provide more jobs. But there’s a catch.

Biodiesel production from crops like canola and corn will make jobs, but production of biofuels from crop and forest waste will create more.

That’s because the technology for biodiesel production already exists. Additional jobs will come when scientists develop technology to produce biofuel from waste.

“Technological breakthroughs need to be made,” Kearney said. “There’s a potential to make a significant number of jobs, but that’s many years in the future. We have the technology to create fuels from things like corn and soybeans. We don’t have the technology to cost effectively create biofuels from waste products. That’s where we need the cellulosic breakthroughs.”

And once it does, the technology must be scaled.

“You have to get research out of lab and into marketplace and that doesn’t happen overnight,” he said. “The question is; Will we get this technology? It might not be doable. The increase in jobs is premised in technological breakthrough.”