By Barbara Grady

In an unmarked Emeryville office building a few blocks from the work-a-day traffic of Interstate 80 and the city's ever-crowded shopping plaza, a group of the world’s leading molecular biologists toil over a project that could be a game changer in efforts to combat climate change.

Scientists at the Joint Bio-Energy Institute are using genetic engineering techniques to create a way to convert biomass substances such as switchgrass and agricultural waste into biofuel quickly and cheaply by introducing synthetic microbes that ferment them into sugars without chemical and cellulose byproducts that thwart their easy use as fuels. 

These scientists hope to create a biofuel that’s so cheap it can replace the 13.8 million barrels of oil used a day by automobiles in the United States. Their work (led by Jay Keasling, the scientist recognized the world over for using similar techniques to create an affordable malaria medicine) could change the economics of fighting climate change.

So significant is the science happening at this new institute that six of the nation’s leading research institutions are partners in it, including Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, University of California campuses at Berkeley and Davis and Carnegie Institute of Washington at Stanford University.

It’s happening in Emeryville, right here in the East Bay.

Four miles away in the bowels of West Oakland’s warehouse and factory neighborhood, 40 low-income residents with barriers to employment gather in a classroom to learn how to install solar photovoltaic systems, weatherize buildings and other skills in growing demand in the green economy. They are participants in the Oakland Green Jobs Corps, a nationally recognized and modeled green jobs program that turns the work of cleaning the planet into a pathway out of poverty.

That too is happening in the East Bay, in Oakland.

These two nationally famous endeavors, with all their differences, are just two pieces of an ambitious consortium involving seven East Bay cities, the University of California at Berkeley, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories, two community colleges and the State University of California East Bay.

It’s called the East Bay Green Corridor Partnership and it’s trying to join all the green technology development and green job activities underway in the East Bay into one green economic development strategy - and marketing pitch – to attract green tech start-ups and federal money to the East Bay. Indeed, it’s trying to make being green pay off economically for a region still struggling with double digit unemployment.  (Go to  http://www.ebgreencorridor.org for more information).

“The EBGC’s current work is geared toward attracting green businesses, supporting startups, and creating high quality jobs,” said the Partnership’s director, Carlin Din, in an email interview this week. 

Din was hired last summer, a year and a half after the Partnership was launched in the living room of University of California at Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau.  By summer, the Partnership idea had gained some traction and participating institutions were learning they would be getting significant Stimulus grants from the federal government for energy research and jobs related programs.  Partnership founders wanted to leverage all these grants and other research activity to attract the interest of green businesses. 

As the Obama administration was rolling out its Stimulus package, the Green Corridor Partnership announced that its participants would be receiving $76 million in grants.  While most of these grants were in the works before the partnership gave a name to itself, it is an impressive list and Partnership organizers felt they could be leveraged to attract green businesses here.  

“We’ve had a number of inquiries from green businesses and we’re in discussions that we cannot disclose at this time,” Din said last week. 

Topping the list, and getting three-quarters of the Stimulus grant money, are three scientific endeavors that are among the most sophisticated science happening in green technology.

One is the Joint BioEnergy Institute which is getting $4 million in Stimulus grants from the U.S. Department of Energy.   ( See www.jbei.org )   

Then, a $30 million grant has been awarded to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California at Berkeley to develop carbon sequestering techniques or capturing carbon dioxide from the air and storing it permanently underground. This U.S. Department of Energy grant establishes Energy Frontier Research Centers at each of those institutions to pursue this work.  

Thirdly, an effort at Lawrence Berkeley Lab to study how nanotechnology can be used to clean up underground contaminants won a $24.5 million grant.

But the jobs portion of the funding is also not insignificant

Close to $18 million has been awarded to green jobs programs in Oakland, Richmond, and Berkeley – expanding the Oakland Green Jobs Corps, the RichmondBUILD and its Solar Richmond component and Rising Sun Energy. Money has been awarded as well to expand green collar job training programs at Peralta Community colleges and Contra Costa County Community colleges. ( Peralta’s Laney College is already a main training ground for the Oakland Green Jobs Corps.)

Just last month, the federal government gave the Oakland Green Jobs Corps another $600,000 to broaden its training beyond green construction and solar to include training in alternative fuels and green tech to answer the needs of potential Partnership businesses, according to the office of Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums.

When asked last week whether the Corridor Partnership has in fact increased the number of green jobs available here, Dellums would only say “I am proud of the work of the Partnership, which is developing a strong foundation to attract, retain and grow green businesses in the region, while creating high quality jobs for our residents.” 

 In other words, it might be too early to tell. The money is just rolling in now.

“Obviously a lot of the success of the Corridor relates to the job training piece,” said City of Berkeley Economic Development Director Michael Caplan and an officer in the Corridor Partnership. “There’s been a lot of money raised for regional training programs and a model has been built for career pathways.”

The Partnership launched two years ago December upon the urging of Chancellor Birgeneau. He invited the mayors and the scientific directors of the University and the National Lab to his home one evening and suggested they team up, joining the cutting edge research coming out of the institutions with Oakland and Berkeley’s desires to be leading green cities. One of the aims was to not lose the entrepreneurial ideas coming out of the Lab and the University to other locations.

Indeed, Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates said, 25 green tech start ups were formed in 2008 from alumni of the Lab and UC Berkeley.  Bates, who chairs the partnership, said they needed a strategy to geographically “capture” the green start-ups emerging from local research before the start-ups set up shop elsewhere. 

It would help to be recognized nationally for the work being done here. Among the founders of the Partnership was Stephen Chu, then director of Lawrence Berkeley Labs and now U.S. Secretary of Energy.  Having Chu in Washington makes it easier to get the federal government to notice the green technology work being done here.

“The East Bay Green Corridor partnership can serve as a model of regional progress in green energy,” Chu told his colleagues at the first annual summit of the Partnership last summer, underscoring – though perhaps understating – the significance this partnership could have if pulled off well.

But perhaps organizers saw the possible imbalance of the Partnership toward high end science and University institutions.  Last summer the Partnership expanded its members beyond the Ivory towers of Cal and Lawrence Berkeley and the area's biggest cities by inviting the two community college districts, as well as California State East Bay and four surrounding cities to join in. Now the cities of Alameda, Albany, El Cerrito and San Leandro are part of the partnership, even if they are not sure what their exact roles are.

It also started appropriating money to training programs. $1 million each went to green job training programs RichmondBUILD and Laney College’s Oakland Green Jobs Corps, as well as to the California Green Jobs Corps and the San Francisco Foundation’s Bay Area workforce funding collaborative. Then. a couple hundred thousand each went to the City of Berkley and to Contra Costa Community College for programs.

Now some bigger awards are on the way, including pending awards of $4 million each to Richmond BUILD, to Peralta Community College, and to Cal State for an energy training program. The Partnership wants to get a workforce ready for alternative fuel start-ups and to that end a $5 million green transportation training grant is pending for Peralta Community College. All of this is part of the $76 million.

“We’re going to promote these programs regionally,” said Caplan. For instance, the City of Berkley is buying slots in the RichmondBUILD training program so some of its residents can attend.

Even though little of the green job training money has landed in the four smaller cities who joined in the summer, administrators of the other cities expect a spill over benefit.

Albany’s assistant city administrator Judy Lieberman said “The Corridor partnership has been quite successful in getting a variety of green workforce development grants, and the addition of training in green jobs will hopefully begin to spill over into our overall region in the next year or two.   As a small city, we are interested in start-ups, incubators, and in green retail and wholesale.”

While it is too early to tell what the overall impact of the East Bay Green Corridor Partnership may be, this is a case where the impact of one part may surpass the whole. If Jay Keasling's biofuel project is successful, the world may change--and if the East Bay Green Jobs training programs are successful, the region may change, driving unemployment down and sustainable energy usage up.

Photo by Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, used under creative commons, http://www.flickr.com/photos/berkeleylab/3523867190/in/set-72157611373464312/