Beer a metaphor for oil spill solution: Grassley aide

UPDATED Sen. Chuck Grassley didn't mean to suggest literally pouring beer on the troubled waters of the Gulf of Mexico to clean up the BP oil spill.

Instead, he only meant to suggest that after 50-plus days of oil spewing from a BP-leased pipeline the federal government must broaden its consideration of possible solutions, a Grassley spokeswoman said.

In a weekly conference call with Iowa news reporters, Grassley said the federal government is doing all it can given its limited expertise in stopping underwater oil spills. However, it's been too slow to respond to requests from state and local officials for help in protecting beaches and marshes.

Beer -- or a beer-like fermentation process being developed by Iowa State University -- might be part of the solution, Grassley said.

“There's a process for making beer that, I don't know if it is the yeast or what it is in making beer, you can put those microscopic things on oil and it eats up the oil and they die and all you have is methane left, but it's clean,” Grassley said.

Grassley was referring to a process being developed by Modular Genetics, Inc. and the Center for Crops Utilization at ISU that is aimed at manufacturing bio-dispersants from soybean byproducts that could be used to protect coastal wetlands from the harmful effects of the BP oil spill.

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Joe Stutler of Cedar Rapids, who is passionate about beer and Democratic politics, said he's unaware of anything in beer that would break down oil.

There are four main ingredients in beer, the operator of www.beeru.com said.

“There's water and it's already out there in the Gulf,” Stutler said. Hops act a flavoring and preservative. Malted barley is a grain, “so in theory it could be used to absorb oil.”

Finally, there's yeast that converts sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide, “but it does not eat oil,” Stutler said.

“So what magical ingredient is he talking about?” Stutler wondered.

Grassley was referring to Modular Genetics' research showing a particular bacterium converts soybean hulls into a bio-dispersant that can potentially be used to replace the toxic chemical dispersants that were used previously in the Gulf.

The natural fermentation process is analogous to the yeast fermentation used to make beer, according to the company.  Rather than converting sugar into beer, the bacterium converts soybean hulls into a bio-dispersant, potentyially stimulating the rate of natural microbial breakdown of the oil.

“The beer-making process was used as a metaphor for how that process occurs,” she said.

Democratic Senate nominee Roxanne Conlin agreed that “everyone is trying their very best to figure out what in the world to do about a problem that is a crisis, an ecological and economic crisis.”

She sees the spill as a “shocking, a stunning” example of the “failure of government” demonstrating the need for “common-sense regulation.”

“We need our government. We need our government protecting  us,” she said. The Bush administration, with the support of Grassley “took the cops off the beat.”

It must have been the Obama administration who re-assigned those cops, according to Grassley campaign spokesman Bob Renaud.

"Conlin should check her calendar.  The oil spill disaster happened a year-and-a-half into the Obama Administration, which gave Transocean an award for safety excellence in 2009," he said. "Clearly, the Obama Adminstration cops were off the beat and the response team has been twiddling its thumbs for the last 50 days. "