America's First Cellulosic Ethanol Plant

hankmt writes "The state of Georgia just granted Range Fuels a permit to create the first cellulosic ethanol plant in America. Cellulosic ethanol produces ethanol from cellulose, which all plants have, instead of from sugar, which is only abundant in food crops. Corn ethanol only produces 1.3 units of energy for every unit of energy that goes into growing the crop and converting the sugar to ethanol. Cellulosic ethanol can produce as much as 16 units of energy for every one unit of energy put into the process. The new plant will be online in 2008 and aims to produce 100 million gallons of ethanol a year."

Comments

Re:In theory, the CO2 is recycled

[timmarhy]

C02 isn't significant in the green house effect anyway. you've been mislead into thinking it. the only emissions significant with cars are the noxious gases that are suplhur based. diesel is really bad for this.

Re:How does this meme get propagated?

[timmarhy]

maybe you should retake it to while your at it.

you don't just push a seed in the ground and it grows you know, it takes lots of ammonia nitrate to grow crops on the scale you are talking about, the production of which requires lots of oil and gas.

all you are doing is fooling yourself into thinking there's no oil being burnt, when really you are just pouring the oil (in another form) on the plants then burning the plants.

I think they're missing something.

[jfekendall]

When they can run cars with the cellulose pumped out of fat American asses then they would be onto something!

Re:fertilizer

[timmarhy]

again your ALL displaying how little you understand about what your mouthing off about.

if you were going to farm for bio fuel, it's not going to happen in a forrest which has an eco system to support your 1000 year old tree. Its going to happen on a large plantation with nothing but the most optimal plant you can grow for your purpose, in an attempt to get the max yield per square metre. if you didn't, in order for bio fuel to be a real contender to replace oil you'd end up deforresting 1/2 your land mass (which is WAY worse then using oil)

the draw back to this, is that repeatedly growing crops on one patch of soil depletes it quickly, especially when using fast growing crops. this is because thier is no bio diversity in a plantation, no way other then external fertiliser to replenish the soil.

so, if you can't understand the problem now, well sorry but your just plain thick.