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They are actually going to gasification first: http://www.rangefuels.com/conversion_process. The enzymes are expensive (and proprietary) http://www.iogen.ca/cellulose_ethanol/what_is_etha nol/process.html. The extra heat used here probably make the whole thing less efficient, but it may still be less expensive. So far as I heard in May, the enzyme based method is not profitable yet.
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Solar power is even more efficient: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

There's a company in Ottawa that's working on cellulose ethanol as well. The company is Iogen Corporation. They have information on the process too. I first heard about them when I was at a Master Brewers Association of the Americas event, and there was a guest speaker from Iogen who talked about the similarities between ethanol production and brewing (i.e. some of the industry knowledge is transferrable).

There's a company in Ottawa that's working on cellulose ethanol as well. The company is Iogen Corporation. They have information on the process too. I first heard about them when I was at a Master Brewers Association of the Americas event, and there was a guest speaker from Iogen who talked about the similarities between ethanol production and brewing (i.e. some of the industry knowledge is transferrable).

Cellulosic ethanol is a proven technology, the only issue now is ramping it up to industrial scale. Iogen and SunOpta (both Canadian biotech companies) have already built pilot plants, and are selecting sites to build industrial scale plants (In Iogen's case, they're contemplating offers from the US, Canada, and European countries to host the plant, which would produce 50 million+ gallons of ethanol a year.)

The great thing about sugarcane and cellulosic ethanol production is they don't require outside power to run, unlike corn ethanol plants. They take a byproduct of the production process and use it for fuel.

Who ever said that corn is the only potential source of ethanol?

I happen to agree with you -- ethanol isn't going to be a 100% panacea, at least not any time soon. However, with investment comes newer technologies which can improve the yields and reduce the costs. What about cellulose ethanol? It is derived from waste straw and corn husks, stalks, and leaves -- all non-food products. What other such plant waste that we currently just throw onto the compost heap could we use to extract further ethanol? Can we develop the necessary technologies to do it in a cheap and reliable manner, creating new economies along the way? And could we perhaps reduce food prices by giving farmers an added significant source of income for the waste parts of their crops? (And I'm thinking this could be extremely valuable in third-world countries, where the Western world currently tends to disadvantage their agri-products in favor of subsidizing their own farmers, but which are also the countries which burn the most fuel, hopefully giving some countries with struggling economies a way to leverage their agricultural capacities in a manner that the West is happy to pay for).

Admittedly, I'm not an energy analyst, but it seems to me there is a huge undertaped agricultural capacity out there in the world. Yes, it takes fuel to produce and transport the ethanol -- but it also takes fuel to produce and transport oil and gas. Oil and water pumps don't run off pixie sticks and good intentions, and the fuel required to run tankers would generally be a wash (per unit volume. Per unit energy might be a different matter, of course, however if the energy is renewable and significantly less polluting, do we really care?).

If further investment can improve the number of sources which we can use to process ethanol in the first place, and can improve the yields, its production may help us extend the lifetime of (and reduce the pollution from) the worlds oil and gas supplies, until such time that we're ready to transition to other energy sources.

Yaz.

>Everyone is focused on everything except one. WHY is the government not looking
>at NON centralized NON corporatist methods of achieving alternative energy sources?

I think you hit the nail on the head, and I have long suspected that the fear of losing their deathgrip on the control of scarce energy resources has been driving huge government and business interests to make sure other, less centralized options are kept off the table.

Energy is a multi-billion dollar industry. What would happen to that industry if anyone could make their own fuel?

What if anyone could buy a bottle of Iogen's ( http://www.iogen.ca/ ) new cellulase enzymes at the grocery store, just like we buy Rid-X enzymes for our septic tanks, throw it in a trashcan in the backyard full of water and lawnmower clippings, and make their own ethanol?

What if anyone really could easily and rapidly convert water into hydrogen? (spare me the jabs on how easy electrolysis already is, please)

I'm no tinfoil-hat guy, but there are huge, huge interests that would be massively hurt by such innovations.

Lately I've been doing a lot of googling on biodiesel ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiesel ), ethanol ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol ), and even wood gas generators (pyrolysis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrolysis )

From what I've seen, most of these processes are fairly simple to do, even at home. I don't think these processes would take much more technical innovation to make simple, practical, cheap decentralized fuel production a reality.

Steve

Don't forget straw. Iogen is has built a small pilot plant in Ottawa that uses straw (a natural normally almost completely useless byproduct of wheat farming) to make ethanl. http://www.iogen.ca/company/technology/cellulose_e thanol.html

There are significant differences between simple sugar based ethanol production and cellulosic ethanol production (based on genetically engineered cellulase enzymes). Iogen has opened up a pilot plant for such cellulosic ethanol a year ago.

In terms of total carbon burden, converting cellulosic biomass to fuel is a benefit, because otherwise this agricultural waste material would be burned off by farmers in the fields, with the energy released going to no work and most of the carbon going into the atmosphere. By capturing the energy for doing work, it reduces total carbon emmissions. Moreover, the waste material is also a fuel used in the production of cellulosic ethanol, reducing the amount of fossil fuels required for its production.

It is silly to grow an energy-intensive food crop to make ethanol, but it makes sense to use existing agricultural waste streams to do so.

These guys say they have a production facilities with uses no outside energy. http://www.iogen.ca/

Is there enough agricultural residue in Canada to support a commercial cellulose ethanol industry?
There are substantial quantities of straw and other crop residues already produced in Canada. In the Western provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta alone, annual production of straw is about 40 million tonnes. If 1/3 of this material was used to make fuel, the nation could replace 10% of its gasoline usage.

So, Alberta alone can provide enough oil to power the equivalent of all of Canada's cars. But ALL the biomass of Canada's wheat belt can only produce 10% of the energy needed to power our transportation network? Yeah, they said 1/3, but that is about the amount of straw they can expect to not be moldy when they get around to picking it up off the fields. And how much of that 10% will be spent trucking otherwise worthless straw from outside Moose Jaw, Sask to the processing plant in Regina that I'm sure the socialist government of Saskatchewan will want to build?

And just when was Alberta separating from Canada? Oh, sorry, that was Newfoundland who was separating. Silly me.

-AD

...

Cellulose ethanol differs from conventional ethanol in the following ways:
a) the manufacturing process does not consume fossil fuels, but rather uses plant byproducts to create the energy to run the process (this leads to a net zero greenhouse gas emissions profile),
b) the technology is new and emerging and has only recently become practical, and
c) the raw material does not compete as a food source for humans and is available today based upon existing farm practices.

...

*How much ethanol do you get from a tonne of feedstock?
Exact output depends on the condition of the feedstock that is put into the process, however approximately 300 litres of ethanol are produced from one tonne of feedstock. There is also approximately 200kg of lignin left after hydrolysis. The lignin can be burned to generate power.

Why should taxpayers pay for hybrid research? Let the car companies do that. If anything, the government should be funding research on techniques to grow more starch-rich plants and engineer more efficient bacteria. In fact, they're doing just that.

Grain isn't the only source either. Municipal waste and switchgrass are other places to get it. There is also research being done to produce ethanol from cellulose which will let you pretty much plant weeds and be able to harvest them for fuel.

Iogen's EcoEthanol process uses an enzyme hydrolysis to convert the biomass into sugars. These sugars are fermented and distilled into ethanol fuel using conventional ethanol distillation technology.

Actually the enzymes are used to break the cellulose (a polysaccaride or sugar polymer) into monosaccarides (simple sugar or sugar monomer). The fermentation is still "convenential." This cellulose breakdown technology has been around for a long time on the lab bench, though not with an efficiency or yield that has been considered commercially viable. Commercializing the creakdown of cellulose into monosaccarides is the patented techology that Iogen brings to the table.

You have to dig around a bit on Iogen's site, but they do come up with *some* numbers. On their FAQ page they claim 300 liters per tonne of feedstock. Corn-based ethanol has a similar yield, though, and it yields more per acre than barley or wheat. (If my superficial googling is reliable, corn can yield 10 or more tons per acre compared to about 3 or 4 tons of straw.)

This is fantastic if it reduces the cost of ethanol production, and allows it to be produced from straw that is currently just burned. But it won't make the gas industry obsolete.

Brings up an interesting question: Do all Canadian petroleum companies get use of this tech since Canadian taxes helped pay for it? Or does just the consortium get to profit from it for a while since they did the actual research?

Either way seems fair from certain perspectives, but if Shell and Petro-Canada are the only ones to profit then what percentage of Canadian cars will actually run the stuff? How many petro companies are there in Canada? How many Canadians will really benefit from their taxes?

It's nice to see that big oil companies are helping fund a project like this too.

Iogen isn't an oil company.

And, they only have 150 employees. A supermajor like Exxon is exponentially larger than this.

But the real trick is reducing the costs of processing cellulose to ethanol to make it competitive with processing glucose from corn (which is more easily broken down) into ethanol. This is trivial when you eliminate all the subsidies, it's just a bit harder when you consider the heavy corn ethanol subsidies. However, companies like Iogen have been producing much more efficient techniques such as enzymatic hydrolysis for breaking down cellulose into an easily fermentable form - which they goes into the yeast fermentation process. The technology is already being deployed at modest scale factories.

So the answer is that yes, yeast do the fermentation. And to make fossil fuel-free, net energy positive ethanol, you just add some weak acid or strong enzymes to the mix earlier on to make sugars that are more easily fermented. As for carbon emissions (as CO2 or otherwise), which you mention, ethanol from cellulose "consumes" as much carbon in the growing plants as it releases when combusted, and in that sense it is both renewable and net-carbon-neutral to the environment. So does ethanol from corn, though the fact that the overall energy production is negative in that case means that the energy deficit has to be made up, generally by burning fossil fuels to generate energy for growing and havesting corn.

Which brings us back to many people complaining here on Slashdot that ethanol is bad for the environment. They just don't understand that ethanol != corn ethanol.