Listen to this Green Air Minute:
Your GAS is GRASS:
Getting rid of our need for foreign oil
by The Green A-Team
Why hasn’t someone perfected this yet??? It sounds TOO PERFECT!!! All those sweet smelling summer grass clippings could actually get you from Dallas to Denver?
The sensation around the American switch grass fuel solution fertilizes even the most jaded of skeptics. What many don’t realize is that ethanol is already the predominant fuel for autos in Brazil. Their nearly bankrupt economy has seen a massive upswing as a direct result.
Hardly a novel innovation, ethanol’s American heritage dates back to Henry Ford’s visionary prediction in 1916, “All the world is waiting for a substitute for gasoline. The day is not far distant when, for every one of those barrels of gasoline, a barrel of alcohol must be substituted.” A farmer himself, Ford knew that just about anything could be fermented including vegetable matter, fruit, weeds, and sawdust.
The question for ethanol producers in the US, Chevron being the largest, is not can they make it but rather how potent and efficeintly can it be made. What Brazil’s got is a lot of sugar cane that’s easily processed into a strong batch of ethanol. What America’s got is a lot of corn that requires additional cooking and the application of enzymes, whereas the conversion of sugar requires only a yeast fermentation process. The amount of energy it takes to produce 2 gallons of ethanol from sugar yields only 1 gallon from corn.
The conundrum is that the US produces 90 million acres of corn per year compared to the 30 million acres of sugar planted in Brazil. Corn’s poor conversion and only a few million acres of sugar cane produced domestically each year, the US ethanol solution seems to evaporate from practicality.
Enter: switchgrass. Known as cellulosic ethanol, it’s chemically identical to ethanol produced from corn or soybean but packs a punch three times stronger than corn ethanol and emits a low net level of greenhouse gases when burned. Recent findings this past January based on large-scale field-trial data conclude that 320 gallons of ethanol can be produced from just 1 acre of switchgrass grown on marginal farm lands. This means that previously unused plots can be seeded to produce robust amounts of biomass without compromising vital land used for food production.
Before planning the fancy garden party to celebrate US independence from foreign oil, the proof will only come from a nationwide effort to produce enough switchgrass without slacking off on development in large-scale water, land, and solar energy applications.
April 12th, 2008 at 12:31 pm
Interesting! Now that’s what I call homegrown energy, all-American fuel.
April 15th, 2008 at 10:19 pm
So cool, right!? Save those grass clippings!