Green Options

It’s been a busy Fall for the making-fuel-out-of-pollution-using-nothing-but-the-power-of-the-sun crowd. First we heard about a company that says it has succeeded in creating a system that uses engineered microbes in reactors out in the desert to eat carbon dioxide and poop out diesel and ethanol. Next we heard about a crazy mirror-ring contraption that reaches amazingly high temperatures to force carbon dioxide to give up one oxygen to make a precursor to fuel. And now…

Researchers at UCLA have engineered a bacteria that can eat carbon dioxide and burp out butanol—a liquid fuel that can be substituted into our existing fuel infrastructure without modification. Yep, that’s right, even your old jalopy can burn butanol without any side effects.

It’s a fact. Corn ethanol has lost its luster. Its intrigue has gone from, say, Sean Connery in Dr. No, to the “let’s-just-pretend-they-never-happened” Timothy Dalton years. Each day now brings news of another ethanol plant closure or project put on “hold.” In fact, the stream of bad news for corn ethanol has become so steady that it has largely faded into background noise — just another sign of a crashing economy.

In reality, however, corn ethanol was set up for a crash before the faltering world economy gave it the impetus to go over the edge. I’m not suggesting that corn ethanol is going extinct, just that, as some industry experts have put it, corn ethanol is going through a “major adjustment” where the outcome will be large swaths of consolidation and efficiency improvements within the industry.

In a way, corn ethanol is finally coming of age. To put it crudely, little Timmy has stopped having wet dreams and gone out and met some actual women.

The technology to make biobutanol, a non-food based biofuel, cost-competitive with gasoline isn’t here yet, but companies in the know say that it could be by 2010.

Regardless of how the debate between corn ethanol and second-generation, non-food ethanol (cellulosic ethanol) pans out, we may be arguing about the wrong thing. “Why’s that?” you might ask. You see, as a source of fuel, ethanol poses several serious problems.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have car with an engine that would happily accept any fuel regardless of its origins? The US Department of Energy’s Argonne Laboratory is developing an engine that may make that dream a reality.

In the June 2008 issue of the journal Nature Reviews Genetics, internationally renowned biofuels researcher Mariam Sticklen proposes that future production of cellulosic biofuels will be made infinitely more efficient and affordable through genetic modification of cellulosic feedstocks such as cereal grains and perennial grasses. Citing the impossibility of fueling the world on starch-based ethanol, such as that from corn, Sticklen argues that cellulosic biofuels are the only viable option for future commercial production.