New Generation of Cellulosic Ethanol Could Avert Food-Price Fallout

Building the Green Economy, Food Security: Africa, Quipu Economic Forum, Zero-combustion paradigm ::

24 June 2008 :: by J.E. Robertson

The New Scientist magazine this week heralds a ‘plan B for biofuel’, making the case that starch-based ethanol fuels, like corn ethanol in the US, may drive up food prices, but a new generation of biofuels will sidestep the problem and help ethanol live up to its promise. “The corn required to fill an SUV tank with bioethanol just once could feed someone in Africa for a year” reports the UK-based magazine, but most biomass is not the starch currently being used to create bioethanol.

“Most biomass is a woody, indigestible mixture of lignin and cellulose, bound up in plan cell walls”, the report continues. The trick is distilling the cellulosic material in plant-waste to ethanol viable for fuel use, a process which costs a reported 50% more than making ethanol from corn starch, at least in the US. And the industry is paying attention to the problem, and working to create the solutions that will make ethanol a more environmentally friendly and economically sustainable fuel source:

In the US alone there are 30 projects in the pipeline to develop cellulosic ethanol “biorefineries”, with half a dozen of these dipping into a government development fund worth $385 million.

If vital advances are made in the refinery process, so that cellulosic biomass can be hydrolyzed into its basic sugars at a competitive cost, the result could be a genuine rebirth of the biofuels industry, with far more material available for fuel production, no need to cut into the food supply to derive ethanol from crops, and the possibility of using fallow ground for fuel-specific crop production.

This does not in itself solve all the problems, as biofuels, being organic in nature, actually emit carbon into the atmosphere. Some proponents hope that growing crops will offset carbon emissions from burning ethanol, but the fact remains combustible biofuels are not a zero-emissions energy resource. Many still believe ethanol is at best a complementary fuel source, best applied to assist hybrid vehicles during the transition from combustible to non-combustible locomotive energy, or an emissions reducer during that same phase of energy innovation.

But carbon-capture technologies could be applied to cellulosic-ethanol-burning motors to produce an emissions-free vehicle engine, in which case, bioethanol could turn out to be a better-than-carbon-neutral fuel that will replace fossil fuels in the interim between combustible fuels and zero-combustion non-nuclear standards of energy production.