SOLDIER, CIVILIAN SENTENCED FOR ROLES IN FUEL THEFTS IN AFGHANISTAN

FROM:  U.S. JUSTICE DEPARTMENT 
Tuesday, October 29, 2013
Army Soldier and Civilian Sentenced on Bribery Charges for Facilitating Thefts of Fuel in Afghanistan

A former U.S. Army Sergeant and a co-conspirator have been sentenced in the District of Colorado for their roles in stealing fuel at Forward Operating Base (FOB) Fenty, Afghanistan, Acting Assistant Attorney General Mythili Raman of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division announced.

U.S. Army Sergeant Christopher Weaver, 30, of Fort Carson, Colo., was sentenced on Oct. 28, 2013, to serve 37 months in prison.  Weaver pleaded guilty Oct. 20, 2012, and was sentenced by U.S. District Court Judge Marcia S. Krieger.                    

Jonathan Hightower, 31, of Houston, Texas, who worked at FOB Fenty as a civilian employee of a contractor and who had conspired with Weaver, was also sentenced on Oct. 28, 2013, to serve 27 months in prison. He pleaded guilty Aug. 3, 2012, and was sentenced by U.S. District Court Judge William J. Martinez.

A third conspirator, former soldier Stephanie Charboneau, pleaded guilty on Sept. 5, 2013, before U.S. District Court Judge Philip A. Brimmer.  Her sentencing is set for Dec. 9, 2013.

Weaver and Hightower were also ordered to pay $1,225,000 in restitution, jointly with Charboneau.  Hightower was also ordered to pay $400,000 in restitution for a related fuel theft scheme that was the subject of the prosecution.

According to court documents, from in or about January 2010 through June 2010, Weaver, Hightower and Charboneau were involved in handling the uploading and transportation of fuel from FOB Fenty, near Jalalabad, Afghanistan, to nearby military bases.  Weaver and Charboneau created false and fraudulent documents purporting to authorize the transport of fuel from FOB Fenty to other military bases, even though no legitimate fuel transportation was required.  Hightower was a civilian who worked at the base’s “fuel point” uploading fuel trucks, occasionally filling the trucks with fuel to be stolen and taking other steps to assist the conspiracy.  At the direction of Weaver and Charboneau, fuel truck drivers used the fraudulent documents to justify the filled trucks’ departures from FOB Fenty.  In truth, after the filled fuel truck left the base, the fuel was simply stolen, and Weaver and Charboneau would receive cash from the representative of the trucking company that supplied the fuel trucks.  The cash would be split among the three conspirators.    

All three conspirators pleaded guilty to receiving payments from a representative of the trucking company in exchange for facilitating the theft of approximately 70 5,000-gallon truckloads of fuel.  Each of the three acknowledged that the loss to the United States was in excess of $1 million.

The cases were investigated by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, the Department of the Army, Criminal Investigations Division (CID); the Defense Criminal Investigative Service; and the FBI.

These cases were handled by Special Trial Attorney Mark H. Dubester of the Criminal Division’s Fraud Section, who is on detail from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR).

IMPROVING THE BREAKDOWN OF CELLULOSE NANOFIBERS

Image caption: An enzyme (shown in blue) pulls out individual cellulose chains (pink) from the pretreated nanofiber surface (green) and then breaks them apart into simple sugars. Image credit, Shishir Chundawat, Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center

FROM: LOS ALAMOS NATIONAL LABORATORY
Less is More: Novel Cellulose Structure Requires Fewer Enzymes to Process Biomass to Fuel
LOS ALAMOS, N.M., June 19, 2013—Improved methods for breaking down cellulose nanofibers are central to cost-effective biofuel production and the subject of new research from Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center (GLBRC). Scientists are investigating the unique properties of crystalline cellulose nanofibers to develop novel chemical pretreatments and designer enzymes for biofuel production from cellulosic-or non-food-plant derived biomass.


"Cellulose is laid out in plant cell walls as crystalline nanofibers, like steel reinforcements embedded in concrete columns," says GLBRC's Shishir Chundawat. "The key to cheaper biofuel production is to unravel these tightly packed nanofibers more efficiently into soluble sugars using fewer enzymes."

An article published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests-counter-intuitively-that increased binding of enzymes to cellulose polymers doesn't always lead to faster breakdown into simple sugars. In fact, Chundawat's research team found that using novel biomass pretreatments to convert cellulose to a unique crystalline structure called cellulose III reduced native enzyme binding while increasing sugar yields by as much as five times.

"The ability of this unconventional pretreatment strategy, currently under development at GLBRC, to selectively alter the cellulose crystal structure may lead to an order of magnitude reduction in enzyme usage. This will be critical for cost-effective cellulosic biofuel production," says Bruce Dale of Michigan State University, who leads GLBRC's biomass deconstruction research area.

The researchers had previously demonstrated that altering the crystal structure of native cellulose to cellulose III accelerates enzymatic deconstruction; however, the recent observation that cellulose III increased sugar yields with reduced levels of bound enzyme was unexpected. To explain this finding, Chundawat and a team of LANL researchers led by Gnana Gnanakaran and Anurag Sethi developed a mechanistic kinetic model indicating that the relationship between enzyme affinity for cellulose and catalytic efficiency is more complex than previously thought.

Cellulose III was found to have a less sticky surface that makes it harder for native enzymes to get stuck non-productively on it, unlike untreated cellulose surfaces. The model further predicts that the enhanced enzyme activity, despite reduced binding, is due to the relative ease with which enzymes are able to pull out individual cellulose III chains from the pretreated nanofiber surface and then break them apart into simple sugars.

"These findings are exciting because they may catalyze future development of novel engineered enzymes that are further tailored for conversion of cellulose III rich pretreated biomass to cheaper fuels and other useful compounds that are currently derived from non-renewable fossil fuels," says Gnanakaran.

This research was funded by the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center (supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Biological and Environmental Research through Cooperative Agreement DE-FC02-07ER64494 between the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System and the U.S. Department of Energy). The LANL team was supported by the National Advanced Biofuels Consortium (NABC), the Center for Non-Linear Studies, and the Laboratory Directed Research & Development (LDRD) program at LANL.


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