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Watermelon Juice Makes Great Biofuel
Mike writes "Watermelons are more than just a tasty summer snack — researchers at the USDA have determined that the fruit constitutes a promising and economically viable source of biofuel. It turns out that the relatively high concentration of directly fermentable sugars in watermelon juice can be easily converted into ethanol. Rather than grow fields of the fruit for the purpose, the report suggests that farmers capitalize on the 20% of each annual watermelon crop that is left in the field because of surface blemishes or because they are misshapen."
I guess this could lead to my Alma Mater returning to its old cheer:
Barbecue! Watermelon! Cadillac car!
We're not as dumb as you think we is!
As a homebrewer, does this actually taste decent?
Any glucose/sugar product can be distilled this way.
Next up: Candy Canes make Great Biofuel
from 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
to 45 2F 6E 40 3C DF 10 71 4E 41 DF AA 25 7D 31 3F
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qG76egCZXfo
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
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I worked for a couple of months on a farm run on manual labour. Dray horses were used when more than a strong back was needed. The owner of the farm made what he called his Kickapoo Juice from the watermelons he grew in a dirt patch near his house. It was a low alcohol content, mild sweet, hot summer's day drink. I high recommend watermelon as a base for biofuel. :)
ideopath @ play
Home to the worlds largest watermelon!
If you have something that you dont want anyone to know, maybe you shouldnt be doing it in the first place -Eric Schmidt
All the best Rum comes from watermelon.
Someone should design a decent bio reactor and distilling apparatus. Farmers would appreciate the free fuel , even if the industry does not adopt watermelon juice powdered cars , tractors have less sophisticated engines that could probably run on mostly alcohol without much damage. I some farmers down here ran their tractors on sunflower oil because that's what they were growing in the fields.
Rather than grow fields of the fruit for the purpose, the report suggests that farmers capitalize on the 20% of each annual watermelon crop that is left in the field because of surface blemishes or because they are misshapen." [emphasis added]
Imagine every other car sporting a "Your car's fuel source is so ugly..." bumper stickers.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The real news is that 20% of the watermelon crop is currently thrown out due to cosmetic issues. I don't understand why shape and surface issues would disqualify the fruit from use in processed foods. Such as watermelon juice, fruit salads, sweeteners, etc. If true (and the article did not provide citations, this represents a stunning waste.
it is green in that the carbon is reabsorbed with the next crop.
Opposed to releasing carbon that's been underground for millions of years.
Of course, there isn't enough crop land for these kinds of bio-fuels to be successful.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Near as I could tell, the only people who claimed that corn ethanol was actually a good idea were corn growers and any politicians who needed votes out in corn country.(and anybody involved with whiskey, of course; but they aren't wrong)
Another site...
From another article:
"Retailers rejects 360,000 tons of âoesubstandardâ fruit annually in America alone they could be used as an economical way to make fuel."
How much, in terms of fuel and resources, does it take to produce these reject, substandard fruits?
"The waste from US growers could produce nearly two million gallons (nine million litres) of biofuel per year."
We use, what, 70 billion gallons per year of motor gasoline?
"Dr Wayne Fish, who led the team, found that 50 per cent of the fruit was fermentable into ethanol which could provide valuable fuel."
What percentage of nuclear material can be used to provide valuable fuel? I'm sure the number is quite high. And it's just sitting there. That's what it's there for! It wants us to use it! We don't have to use energy to make another product, only to use more energy to make another product, only to convert the negligible amounts of waste into a fuel product!
"The study, published in the journal Biotechnology for Biofuels, discovered that watermelons could produce around 20 gallons of fuel per acre from fruit that otherwise would go to waste."
How many gallons of fuel could be saved by upgrading the efficiency of farmland use?
Watermelons are fresh, delicious fruit. They're for eating, not for fueling your vehicles.
TFA sticks with the "economically viable" phrase and doesn't offer any numbers or details.
Plenty of things, including oil sands, arctic natural gas, and burning baby seal blubber can be "economically viable" in certain situations, but only when more traditional sources of crude oil reach a certain market price. This article doesn't even conjecture about when and where watermelon fuel could be "economically viable" compared to crude oil, and comparison with crude oil marks the only concrete method of making the comparison.
Naturally, using watermelons you've already grown for fuel might be viable at a pretty low return, compared with letting them rot, but the article doesn't prove that, either.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again, ANY food source used as a bio-fuel is a terrible idea. Using food sources for bio-fuels has resulted in people STARVING to death in developing nations. Why can't these intelligent scientists see this? Even if it's only for spoils of watermelon crops, the fine line between selling the entire source for fuel vs food will become invisible - just as it happened for corn and wheat.
It took a global economic meltdown to correct food prices to help reset this stupidity. But it seems these morons (lets call a spade a spade) forgot this fact. All it takes is for watermelons to get expensive, and in poorer countries, you'll have the farmers selling their entire crops to bio-fuel companies.
Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things. - Peter F. Drucker
It WAS green, at one time! ;)
Do those professors know how much water it's needed to grow watermelons?
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
Is it a good idea to use food pre-consumption as a serious fuel? There are quite a lot of people who would like food to eat, more so than fuel vehicle or even electricity.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
I agree. We could build solar power in the southwest, and nuclear plants in other areas where land use or weather is an issue and completely replace all our use of fossil fuels. Except that grid power really isn't a replacement for oil used in mobile vehicles.
To power mobile energy use we would need a better way to transfer grid power to vehicles. For ocean going vessels, the nuclear plants used by the military could be adapted for civilian use. Trains could be grid bound relatively easily. Cars can be battery powered for short distances, but would be only be effective with current technology if they could be charged from the grid while moving. We really don't have a way to replace fossil/bio fuel for aircraft.
This is all wonderful, us rich people can continue to drive GMC Yukons or whatever, except it has the same problems as using other foodstuffs for fuel. Oh, sure, you can use the 20% bad watermelons for it, but once watermelon->fuel processing capacity exists, market prices will dictate whether the 80% of good melons go to the grocery store or to the melon refinery, and when the global economy bounces back and fuel prices go up, it'll be just one more thing putting pressure on the food supply. Before anyone says "oh, but watermelons can't be a large part of the global food supply," what happens with cash crops is they end up more valuable than food crops (hence the name) and displace them in the fields.
And so this whole thing is barking up the wrong tree - the fuel is alternative, but it sure isn't sustainable, just one more squeeze on substance farmers someplace we don't give a damn about.
Even as you read this, your pants are strangling your loins! Aaa!
Or maybe Congress could respect the 10th amendment. I know that's a lot to ask.
If you have something that you dont want anyone to know, maybe you shouldnt be doing it in the first place -Eric Schmidt
Good cropland is scarce enough as it is. Urban areas are constantly expanding and turning cropland into cityscape. It doesn't make much sense to hasten this trend by effectively converting space for growing food into space for fueling our vehicles.
I swear, the only reason we continue to see these ridiculous schemes is because the fuel companies don't want to see everything go electric. It won't be long before battery technology catches up and allows us to drive a reasonable distance on a charge. (Or we could just take advantage of the various swappable battery technologies that have already been developed for cars.)
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
What is this based on? I currently own five cars, all of them have over 100k miles on them. Some bought used, some bought new, and the only problem I have had was with the used cars that came out of a non-gasohol area needing frequent fuel filter changes. I admit that if I forgot to do this it killed the in-tank fuel pump, but that was something I knew would happen, I just forgot about the needed maintenance. I have seen no evidence of "engine destruction." I have not heard about any engine destruction, with the exception of a news story last year where a small engine mechanic said that older engines had trouble with the ethanol fuel mix. Well, if the fuel system has neoprene parts, it will get attacked by the ethanol. None of my yard machines has had a fuel problem, and a friend with a landscape company has not had any fuel issues either.
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
No love for safe and reliable nuclear energy?
Look, numerous studies have been done and they show over and over that Solar can NOT provide everything. Nor, can wind and solar.
A serious question to you. I am a backer of AE, but I look at the simple fact that even if we built all the wind as fast we could AND all the solar PV that we could, it would still take us over a decade to make a real dent. So, it is PLAINLY OBVIOUS that this can NOT be the only solution. Yet, ppl like yourself REFUSE TO ACKNOWLEDGE that. Why? Seriously, why? Also, Solar PV is THE MOST EXPENSIVE solution that we can do at this time. In fact, it will remain that way for no less than 5 years, and more likely for another decade. So, why are you pushing this?
Why not push Solar Thermal, Geo-thermal, and more nukes? Solar Thermal AND geo-thermal are all capable of generating electricity at a price equal or lower than Natural Gas TODAY. And both are about to go below Coal prices. Yet, ppl like yourself do not push it.
In addition, if you are concerned about CO2 and/or oil imports, then you HAVE to back Nukes as well as fast development of Algae for bio-fuels. The reason for Algae is that it allows us to replace oil for the majority of its use. And there are PLENTY of places that oil is required. For starters, Aviation. But, why do ppl like you oppose all these things and just push the WORST alternative. In fact, at this moment, the IMPOSSIBLE address. Why not accept that we need far more than s
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The queues are long enough at the gas station already without having to wait for people to get EVERY LITTLE SEED out before pumping their cars full..
Good. When the gas engine dies maybe that SUV will be replaced with a vehicle that doesn't suck.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
I can eat one of those and make biofuel from it at the same time.
We don't have the power infrastructure to support moving that power around. You're talking about a mult-trillion dollar upgrade to our infrastructure for that to be viable. It's the exact reason that "electric cars" are currently not even a remotely realistic solution to the oil problem.
Have you ever held a fully grown watermelon?
How about picked and loaded a truckfull of it, taken it to the market and then be told that you should either return a part of it cause they are bellow the buy-off quality or that you will be paid less for those watermelons, again on account of lower quality?
It is WAY cheaper to do quality control before PICKING, and just grow more to cover for the statistics.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
forget about that! doesn't anyone here have a problem with using racist fuel?
weinersmith
Multi-Tillion is easy. It sounds like a troll, but it's a good idea.
Put off Obamacare for the next decade or three. Take that money and throw at the power grid/AE sources. When that is up and running we'll be saving enough money on foreign oil and power bills that we can afford health care.
--Forest C. Adcock--
Because other people should suffer reduced benefit/lifespan from products they've purchased because you don't agree with their decision. Riiight. Stop being an eco-dick; some people have good reason to own an SUV or large truck. For example, my truck stays parked except when I need to transport other vehicles or bulk items. I can usually make 1 trip in the truck @ 16mpg (regardless of weight), or I can make 4-5 trips in the car that normally has a 30mpg rating which drops to about 20 when heavily loaded. Blind hatred is just as pathetic as stupidity.
Exactly. Iowa's early primary ensures that any canidate trying to raise more money has to take the pledge to support ethanol as a biofuel. If they point out how wastefull and pointless it's been, they'll have a weak showing there, and their campaign contributions will take a hit. Plus no congressman with eyes on the presidency would be willing to vote against corn for the same reasons.
Ethanol subsidies have been a huge waste, the money is all going to ADM, which is the last company we should be giving it to.
That wiki page also has some interesting stats on the taxes. "every $1 of profits earned by its ethanol operation costs taxpayers $30." And we're STILL dependant on oil. It's not even that they take corporate welfare, I'd be mad enough just based off how lousy an investment that is.
Call me when they can run cars with Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters.
Although watermelons and corn can make biofuels: I offer you a much better alternative: Kudzu vine. It's already been synthesized into kudzuhol Kudzu grows up to a foot a day, it's the vine that ate the south. It just seems a waste to convert perfectly good food to biofuel.
I can attest first hand. I've made wine out of many odd things and watermelon is by far the worst. Just don't. It tastes bad, it looks bad, it smells bad.
If you're looking for an ambitious but possibly tasty wine making fruit try pomegranate instead but really if you just want something that will taste good use welch's 100% grape juice or cran/grape combo.
First peanuts were good for everything, now this. Same idea, only bigger...and green...and red...and much juicer. It's truly the wonder fruit. See here
The United States is, by far, the largest producer of corn in the world. Corn is grown on over 400,000 U.S. farms. In 2000, the U.S. produced almost ten billion bushels of the world's total 23 billion bushel crop. Corn grown for grain accounts for almost one quarter of the harvested crop acres in this country. Corn grown for silage accounts for about two percent of the total harvested cropland or about 6 million acres. The amount of land dedicated to corn silage production varies based on growing conditions. In years that produce weather unfavorable to high corn grain yields, corn can be "salvaged" by harvesting the entire plant as silage. According to the National Corn Growers Association, about eighty percent of all corn grown in the U.S. is consumed by domestic and overseas livestock, poultry, and fish production. The crop is fed as ground grain, silage, high-moisture, and high-oil corn. About 12% of the U.S. corn crop ends up in foods that are either consumed directly (e.g. corn chips) or indirectly (e.g. high fructose corn syrup). It also has a wide array of industrial uses including ethanol, a popular oxygenate in cleaner burning auto fuels.
http://www.epa.gov/oecaagct/ag101/cropmajor.html
There's currently some good work being done to develop an algae based jet fuel. Also what about wind?
Seems to me obtaining sugar from fruit is a highly inefficient process. I mean the plant have to grow all the infrastructure (root, stalk, leaves) that will end up being wasted anyway.
Wouldn't it be easier to synthesize sugar from pythoplanktons. All you need is water, CO2 and sunlight.
Better still it can be made into a rolling production line:
1. Start a batch with water, add sugar synthesizing pythoplankton and expose to sunlight.
2. After sufficient concentration of sugar is achieved, add fermenting bacteria and let the sugar ferment
3. Extract ethanol.
4. Repeat ad nauseum.
Importantly, this process can be run all year long with no need to wait for harvest season. Also, there would be no competition for land for food growing.
Growing will only deplete the remainder of the land we need for growing food. We need to build more nuclear power plants and reduce energy usage through education, legislation, and new technology. Worried about the waste? Why not use a huge catapult to eject it out of our orbit? We don't need to keep burying stuff. Let's launch it into space!
Rather than grow fields of the fruit for the purpose, the report suggests that farmers capitalize on the 20% of each annual watermelon crop that is left in the field because of surface blemishes or because they are misshapen."
And what's the likelihood farmers are going sell watermelons for food if they can make more selling them for biofuel?
Also TFA doesn't say how much ethanol an acre can produce. How does it compare to switchgrass, for instance?
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
No, it's likely not concentrated enough to be economically viable.
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
Growing food for producing fuel is just mad. mad. mad.
In my opinion it's the cellulose to ethanol technologies we should be concentration on to use stems, stalks or weeds instead of the sugar to ethanol fuels that were made successfully at industrial scales way back in WW2 when it was difficult to get enough oil. Turning food grown with petrochemically produced fertilizers into fuels is wrong on many levels even if it uses a loophole in common sense to put money in pockets. The USA would be better off just importing cheap Brazillian or (gasp, commies!) Cuban sugar or ethanol if we want to do it more efficiently. Cane, beet and a variety of other sugars are cheaper to produce and import than corn syrup - it's just the tariff protection for cane farmers that pushes the price up and ironicly let to the price of sugar being so high that the cane farmers lost most of their market to corn.
Finally, someone brings up the algae! The little buggers contain a lot of oil, can grow in virtually any environment, they live short lives and are hugely numerous and thus adapt quickly to become even more prolific. Squeeze the juice (or rather, oil) out of them, add a few chemicals to the mix, let it simmer and voila! Biodiesel!
This is where I say "yeah, I exaggerated how easy it is" but really, that is pretty much all there is. Why aren't companies buying huge swaths of barren, otherwise useless land to grow algae already?
Algae has potential, but its in development. Solar and nuclear power are ready now and proven. Wind power is inadequately reliably to provide base load power to the grid. And with the rise of modern piracy and the trend towards rapid delivery, sailing ships probably won't be making a comeback any time soon.
Government wastes your money, news at 11. Seriously, what do you expect? Competent government? Next you will be telling me that people want the government to run their health care for them.
At 147+ comments, I don't yet see a single horrible joke about Gallahger, or a retarded racist stereotype yet. Yes, there are the standard racists troll posts, but none making use of the obvious watermelon reference.
You'd basically be making wine out of watermelon juice, and because watermelon doesn't seem to have much acidity or tannin to it, you'd get a very, very insipid beverage. Think weak vodka and water with a faint watermelon aroma. You could make it better by adding acid blend (typically a mixture of malic, tartaric, and citric acids) and grape tannin... but unless I had a source of free watermelons, I doubt I'd bother.
... how much watermelon is really grown in the US? Even if you used all of the leftover 20%, I doubt you'd make much of a dent in our fuel supply requirement. And given that it costs rather a lot of money to make a distilling plant, I can't see how you'd recover your costs. I just don't see leftover watermelon as a very important source of energy in any realistic scenario.
First of all, the mechanism and scale of the waste is noteworthy, this is pork that's vying with military contracts for sheer size. Some waste is inevitable, not this much. Second, this isn't a case of simple government waste, this is a case of a private corporation wasting my taxes. I'd say this is "Ridiculous primary system aligned perfectly to help government and private industry waste your money."
The biggest wastes of taxpayer money aren't government-only, they're when the government teams up with private companies. Fiscal conservatives love to point out government waste, but ignore the more egregious examples with private industry. I wonder if it's because it implies there is no perfect financial solution, or if it's because it's an argument against defense spending and medicare.
I wonder if it's because it implies there is no perfect financial solution,
I think that this is necessarily true. People are not perfect and therefore any system created by people for the governance of people is bound to be imperfect. However, I also know that some solutions are more perfect than others and ever bigger government is not my idea of the right direction.
or if it's because it's an argument against defense spending and medicare.
Some spending on defense is unfortunately necessary because, as I stated previously, people are imperfect and the world is full of violent people who will kill you and take your property by force. So some resources must be spent to prevent the barbarians from coming over the proverbial hills seeking loot and pillage. As I have said, I view defense as a very necessary evil because without it nothing else matters because we will all be either dead or enslaved (as recorded history so amply demonstrates). I view health care in general and medicare in particular as a much less defensible (pardon the pun) expenditures of taxes. I would like to see more efficient spending in defense too (I think we spend too much for what we get) and even though that is highly unlikely, hence my original statement concerning government waste, I am not prepared to go the full on anarcho-capitalist route and dispense with centralized government entirely. The only reasonable and feasible course then is minimization and I fail to see how expanding the government massively, as our current President Obama is doing more rapidly than any other president since FDR, will lead us all to a good end.
Ploughing waste back into the land or leaving it to decompose is hardly wasting anything - it's a natural fertiliser and reduces the need for less sustainable artificial fertilizers
I'm not sure why this is the case, but a great many /.ers and self-proclaimed environmentalists in general, reflexively dismiss anything to do with biofuel technology as if it is somehow even worse for the environment than, say, deep-water drilling, open-pit mining for coal and bitumen sands, handling nuclear waste, etc. Heaven forbid we think of using ethanol as a fuel--we'd have to mow down the rest of the rainforest to plant sugar cane and hoard all the corn from starving Africans to power our SUVs!
There is a lot of misinformation about biofuel technology, and I would not be surprised in the slightest if most of it is based on faulty science or is even outright lies. I read a study once on how inefficient corn ethanol production is, and it turns out that the study was completely faulty--they included the energy it took to build the ethanol "refinery" itself as part of the energy production (as well as other capital costs like building more tractors, silos, etc), then held that number up to well known figures on what it takes to produce a barrel of oil--except that the latter only included actual energy production costs, not the cost in energy to build drilling platforms, refineries,etc. So they published incorrect, very misleading estimates about corn ethanol. Truth be told, growing corn specifically to produce fuel is not even close to the best biofuel strategy, but in terms of production efficiency it is maybe on the order of 1/2 as efficient as conventional fuels rather than what faulty estimates originally stated (those critics used this kind of faulty estimate to conclude corn ethanol wss barely break-even--that you barely got enough energy out of using the ethanol fuel to make up for the energy expended to produce it--turns out they were wrong by more than an order of magnitude if their data was properly interpreted).
As I said, corn ethanol is a poor choice for use as biofuel, probably focused on more because of effective political lobbying than effective science. HOWEVER, biofuel technology in general is incredibly important in terms of making the world more sustainable. This "watermelon solution" is a perfect example. "Greenies" endlessly carp on how biofuels would result in food shortages, all the while ignoring the fact that over most of the industrial world we produce something like 150% of the food consumed by our population...and that counts what makes it to retail only--if you take into account what is thrown away as scrap as stock is rotated out of stores or what is tossed from our kitchens we are lucky if we actually eat much more than HALF the food we produce. Where does almost all of it go? INTO LANDFILLS.
THAT is a complete waste of potential energy right there. Food that is buried deep in landfills decomposes VERY slowly in the anaerobic environment of a landfill. "biodegradable" foodscraps can be recognisable for a few YEARS after their disposal, and as they slowly decompose they emit a greenhouse gas FAR WORSE than CO2--that being CH4. CH4--natural gas-- is a good candidate for biofuel of course, and some landfills capture what they can for electricity generation, but the process is far less efficient than it could be--more CH4 remains as emissions than is collected.
Your contention that ploughing waste back into the ground is not waste because it is fertiliser is actually false. Plants cannot take in nutrients directly from the waste of a previous crop, save perhaps any water it retains. Sugars must be broken down. Cellulose in plant fibres have no nutritional value to a plant intil they break down. To wait for the old chaff/straw/scraps to break down would require significantly more fallowing than farmers would like, thus the reason for additional tilling, harrowing, burning or removal of old crop material, etc. With fru
You can't till ALL your crop waste into the ground year after year. It has to be composted or it will hurt yields. If you composted it all in-field you'd have to fallow every other year, and that would mean having to use far more land to produce the same amount of food. A certain amount of crop debris is harmless or even beneficial, but if it is present in excess and is not managed with some combination of crop rotation, fallowing, and tilling can actually be HARMFUL to crop yields.
You cant leave fallen fruit on or near ground surface for other reasons--crop diseases (blights, insects, bacteria, etc) would be a problem especially because of the sugar content of the rotting fruit. At best this reduces yield, at worst can contaminate food supply with substances harmful to humans.
Converting food land to bio-fuels is a horrible waste of time and money.
Not making best use of the crops WE ALREADY GROW ON THIS LAND is probably even worse. You didn't even read the summary, you just saw "biofuels" and started spouting off. This solution USES ZERO EXTRA LAND to produce fuel. Biofuels needn't replace ALL fuel production--they can be a good way to make use of what is wasted today.
State laying industrial solar power in non farming area.
Don't be a dummy...where do you think plants get their energy from...THE SUN...leaves are nature's little solar panels. Put man-made solar panels in the desert..that's great...but why not make use of all the energy we can from what is collected from crops that is wasted today?
Do it fast, get it done. we can power the nation from that.
we can probablly make biofuel from the juices of wasted fruit crops just as fast or faster than from solar panels. Why not do both?
Good cropland is scarce enough as it is.
That is incorrect. Farmland is plentiful. We can already produce far more calories of food than we need to survive--like TWICE as many. The problem is efficiency and distribution and politics. Whoever tells you there is a shortage of farmland is LYING.
It doesn't make much sense to hasten this trend by effectively converting space for growing food into space for fueling our vehicles.
You didn't even read the article SUMMARY did you? THEYA RE USING WASTE PRODUCTS...stuff farmers cannot sell in this case. THEY DO NOT PROPOSE TO USE ANY MORE LAND THAN THEY ALREADY ARE. There are two ways to increase efficiency of farmland:
* get more people to buy local - the less distance food has to travel the less spoilage, damage, wasted fuel, etc.
* USE WASTED PRODUCTION MORE WISELY--stop throwing away. REDUCE what you throw away, REUSE what you can and RECYCLE what you cannot use. What is wrong with RECYCLING wasted crop products into fuels that can be used for something else beneficial?
It won't be long before battery technology catches up and allows us to drive a reasonable distance on a charge.
It takes a LOT of energy to make these batteries...then you have to keep them charged. Where does the electricity come from? Can't come all from solar, nobody wants a new nuclear plant in their back yard...why can't the electricity come from biofuels? Whether burned or used chemically as in fuel cells?
There isn't a problem with biofuel technology it is just that it is being mis-applied. And it isn't "fuel companies" (the biggest of which are oil companies--they'd NOT want to see biofuels succeed) pressig for the use of ethanol. It is the corn growing lobby that is pushing for ethanol, which is why it emerged ahead of things like this watermelon scheme or algae-based biodiesel...corn-states buying congressional votes for politicians. Bad policy but doesn't make biofuel technology itself bad--the concept should still be pursued...just in a different way.