Word: switchgrass
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...what if biofuels could be made without food crops, using an inedible plant grown on less than optimum farmland? That's exactly the thinking behind the push to develop cellulosic ethanol from the waste plant switchgrass, which grows throughout the Midwestern prairies, with little input from farmers. Instead of fuel from food, switchgrass cellulosic ethanol promises fuel from virtually nothing - and a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) argues that it's worth making the switch...
...biggest such study to date, scientists led by Kenneth Vogel from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln performed long-term, large-scale field studies on raising switchgrass as an energy crop. Farmers in 10 fields of 15 to 20 acres each in Nebraska and North and South Dakota grew switchgrass over five years, and kept track of how much fuel and fertilizer they used during the trials. Vogel and his colleagues showed that switchgrass yielded 540% more energy as a biofuel than the amount of energy used to grow, harvest and process it. (Corn ethanol...
Farmers don't have a lot of experience growing switchgrass for fuel, but Vogel points out that as the crop is more widely adopted on farms, we can expect the yield to grow - perhaps even double, as corn yields have over the past few decades. But there's still a long way to go before you'll be able to fill your tank with switchgrass. Getting energy out of the tough cellulose molecules in a stalk of switchgrass is much more difficult than distilling it from corn, or better, sugar cane. Both the Department of Energy (DoE) and private companies...
...takes to make and provides 40% of all the fuel sold in Brazil. But such ethanol causes environmental problems of its own, as forests are cleared for cane fields. Better still would be to process ethanol from agricultural waste like wood chips or the humble summer grass called switchgrass. The cellulosic ethanol they produce packs more energy than corn ethanol, but it also takes more energy to manufacture. "If you make ethanol by burning coal, you defeat the purpose," says Sarah Hessenflow Harper, an analyst for the advocacy group Environmental Defense...
...environmental record--from the abandonment of Kyoto to the President's broken campaign pledge to control carbon output to the relaxation of emission standards--has been dismal. George W. Bush's recent rhetorical nods to America's oil addiction and his praise of such alternative fuel sources as switchgrass have yet to be followed by real initiatives...