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Ethanol From Waste Straw
phcrack writes "The CBC is reporting that 'Iogen Corporation of Ottawa has developed enzymes to break down waste straw and wood chips into ethanol on a commercial scale.' Apparently traditional ethanol from food crops like corn used at least as much energy to create as they released when burned. It's nice to see that big oil companies are helping fund a project like this too. It's very rare today to hear of a major company throwing money at a research project since the '80s."
It's nice to see that big oil companies are helping fund a project like this too.
Of course they'd fund it.
Around here "gasohol" is a 10% ethanol, 90% gasoline mixture. Any company can find a way to make that 10% ingredient cheaper than their competitors will find themselves in a very enviable position. It's smart business.
Trolling is a art,
It may be rare to hear about them, but long-term research certainly isn't dead. There are companies (3M, Dow, DuPont, Monsanto, GlaxoSmithKline, and Lockheed Martin all spring immediately to mind) that have been conducting long-term research projects older than most of the Slashdot crowd.
That we don't hear a lot about them has less to do with their scarcity than it has to do with the relative non-newsworthiness of the progress these projects make. People don't want to hear about the bricks being put in place; they want to hear about the store opening.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Uhm, Canada (like most of the civilized world) uses metric.
> It's very rare today to hear of a major company throwing money at a research project since the '80s."
That's because research is usually either classified or not 'sexy'. The fact that you don't hear about it all the time is because if there is nothing to announce the researchers are happier researching than writing press releases ('sorry nothing yet').
MP3 Search Engine
Since the corn farmers of Iowa have made ethanol a political litmus-test for presidential nominees, the American people have been stuck paying huge amounts (something like $30 for each $1 of profit earned by ethanol sales) to provide "corn welfare" benefits. Do you really think that such a powerful lobby will allow imports of a cheaper type of ethanol?
Expect to hear planted stories about the unhealthiness/antienvironmental harms of the "new" ethanol, followed by urgent Congre$$ional action to shut off the flow of cheap foreign ethanol (and amend such a ban to include Americans who might get the idea of making ethanol from products other than corn). This isn't tinfoil-hat stuff, just the depressing reality of democratic politics: when the public isn't interested in an issue, naked interest-group politics takes precedence.
Make cheese not war 8:)
I was reading here some mentions of how the US government pays farmers not to grow crops. I've heard of it before and I was wondering what the rationale is. I guess we'd have a huge surplus if everyone grew as much as they could all the time, but isn't it a little more complicated than that? If we used all of our land all the time, wouldn't we deplete it faster? I mean, doesn't the soil need time to regenerate? I know people want to grow food at full capacity and feed the world or make fuel or whatever, but is that really sustainable? What about all the petroleum products used to make the fertilizers to grow the crops? Does that get figured into the amount of net energy the ethanol provides?
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
No idea, but that is irrelevant. It appears that nearly any farm waste can be used, as well as other cellulose-based waste (e.g. wood chips, sawdust, yard waste) that people/companies often pay to have removed. It may not be the solution to the world's energy problems, but it is a lot more of a step in the right direction than you give credit for.