High Fuel Prices Make Cellulosic Biofuels Increasingly Competitive With Gas
Mongabay.com:
A new institute in the San Francisco Bay Area is seeking to make cellulosic biofuel an economically viable alternative to corn ethanol and gasoline within the next five years.
The Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI), a partnership between three national laboratories and three Bay Area universities, was formed in June 2007 after the U.S. Department of Energy awarded the institute a $125 million grant to develop better methods for making liquid biofuels from the natural cellulose in trees and grasses. 
JBEI researchers expect cellulosic biofuels to yield more energy, produce less greenhouse gases, and have less impact on the environment than other alternatives to gasoline, such as corn ethanol. The primary need for such fuels is in the transportation industry, institute scientists believe.
“You can’t fly planes on photovoltaic panels,” said Harvey Blanch, chief science and technical officer at JBEI. “You’ve got to have high energy content liquid fuels. There’s just some applications where there’s no alternative.”
U.S. production of corn ethanol has surged to meet the need for alternative fuels, a trend favored by midwestern politicians but decried by many environmental experts. Cellulosic ethanol would be a major improvement over corn ethanol, said Raya Widenoja, a biofuels expert at the Worldwatch Institute, an environmental group in Washington, D.C.
Corn requires water and fertilizers to grow, which degrades soil and water quality, Widenoja said. Corn produces relatively few tons of usable biomass per acre, and corn ethanol also competes with cultivating crops for food. What’s more, corn ethanol provides only about a 12 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions over gasoline, according to a University of Minnesota study.
By contrast, most cellulosic ethanol crops are grasses or scrubby trees, native plants that grow without water or fertilizer. Read more.
Related posts:
- More Corn Ethanol Could Boost Cellulosic Ethanol Wired News: The ethanol industry is taking a beating from...
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
