Food or fuel. Do we make biofuels out of the food we are going to eat, or do we make fuel to power our cars. Things like biodiesel, ethanol and other biofuels are most often made from things like corn, soy beans, sugar cane, and other food crops. So what is it going to be, do we feed hungry people or hungry cars?

The best choice might turn out to be both. Making ethanol from cellulose might make it possible to make everyone happy. As we talked about a couple days ago, ethanol is most often made by fermenting and distilling alcohol out of anything with sugars in it. Because food crops are full of sugar and carbohydrates (among other tasty qualities), and because we already have the technology to make large quantities of them, they make the perfect feed stock for ethanol production. It also doesn’t hurt that we have a large and powerful farmers lobby in the Midwestern states that can “help” politicians see the wisdom in making farmers (and by farmers I mean giant Agribusiness’s) the next oil tycoons.

“What percentage of our crop output will be needed to supply all of our fuel needs?” you may be asking yourself. Well lets just put it this way, all of it, and then some. There is no way we can supply all of our fuel needs with food crops, if we farmed nothing but ethanol corn and soybeans it still wouldn’t be enough to fuel all the cars and feed all the people. But there is a way to have our bio-fuel and eat it too.

We simply don’t make ethanol out of food, duh. Plants store there energy in easy to eat packets we call fruits, vegetables, tubers, roots, shoots, berries, etc. But they also keep a lot of energy in things we don’t usually call food, things like bark, woody stems, leaves, grass’s, etc. If we could find a way to unlock the sugars and carbohydrates stores in these “waste” parts of the plant we could make ethanol out of it and leave the food for the mouths of hungry people.

Continue reading The Other Ethanol – Making Ethanol From Cellulose →