There has been a lot of heady talk, and reporting, in recent years on the potential for easing use of petroleum fuels by switching in ethanol made from wood, straw, and other bio-sources of cellulose. In principle, if the right catalyst or, more likely, enzymatically talented microbe could be found, the twisted sugars of cellulose could be disentangled and fermented in a jiffy into ethanol or other liquid fuel.
A few specialty outlets are reporting that the EPA, seeing little if any commercial prospect for mass production this year or soon thereafter, is slashing its target for production of the stuff under the guidance of the Energy Independence & Security Act of 2007. National policy is to satisfy 30 percent of transportation needs with biofuels by 2030, with efficient conversion of cellulose to a gasoline or diesel substitute a big part of the presumption that it can be done. For now, most US ethanol is still being made from corn grain. It barely beats break-even in the efficiency equation and, if pushed to larger volumes, prompts worry it would take so much land and corn that food prices would soar for both people and livestock. But corn stalks, hay, scrap wood, and other vegetation is full of unexploited cellulose.
Looks like an opportunity for some enterprising science or energy writers to get hold of the entrepreneurs, professors, and nat’l lab scientists trying to hurry this switch-grass-to-gas-tank transition along. They never said it would be easy, but government went ahead and set up incentives and lures to industry in hope for a breakthrough. The idea was that genetic engineering, or the regular kind, would move apace. What’s the hangup, exactly?
That there IS a hangup is clear enough from news reports written in the sometimes turgid manner of business reporting for business managers:
- Bloomberg – Kim chapman, Mario Parker: EPA Proposes Cellulosic Ethanol Short of U.S. Goals;
- Biomass Magazine – Kris Bevill : EPA slashes 2011 cellulosic estimates ;
- Domestic Fuel Cast – Cindy Zimmerman: Industry Concerned About Lowering Cellulosic Ethanol Goals ;
I learned first of this development from a thorough article by Dina Fine Maron on ClimateWire, one of several subscription on line newsletters from Energy and “Environment Daily. I’m trying to get an open link to it and will update this post if successful.
Ironic Grist for the Mill:
Among the larger, focussed efforts on advanced microbial biofuel research is in the Energy Biosciences Institute in Emeryville, CA. Here is its May Press Release on calls for proposals. Its staff is largely researchers from UC Berkeley, some from the Berkeley Nat’l Lab that DOE head Steven Chu directed before heading for DC, and the Univ. of Illinois. The irony: its money is from BP. Surely there is a good story in the contrast between the company’s efforts to plug its well in the gulf, and the (big, but far smaller) money it’s putting into research that could reduce the need to drill in such deep water while countering the greenhouse effect too. Even if one cynically regards BP’s biofuels initiative as a p.r. feint, the institute seems to take its mission seriously. BP is still in that game elsewhere, as seen in this Press Release.
Pic: Nat’l Renewable Energy Lab, via source ;
– Charlie Petit
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