Didn't a researcher from Minnesota present findings recently that mixed prairie grasses provided the highest bio yield by a large margin? Wouldn't it be cheaper to go the BTL route than enzymes with a mixed crop input?

Let's rename this the whiners blog - most of you do not even sound like americans here. Our Rovers have been transmitting from all over Mars waaay past their expiration dates - and we can't make homebrew back here on Earth???????? We can produce all the ethanol we want, if we are willing to pay for it.

Okay I'm going to take a break. The poets and engineers and other petty complainers, can now moan and groan and complain.

At five dollars a gallon, Dyadic and Novozymes will be rich and we will have all the cellulosic ethanol we need. Ditto Startech and Dynamotive and Petrosun and Abengoa. However you would rather whine on about your birthright to ridiculously cheap personal transportation. The corn ethanol is a building block for the future, not more, not less - the distilleries can and will be flipped for cellulosic, since the anaerobic conversion is the last two thirds of the process.

K - you are on the right track - biofuels are necessary to put life back into the rural economy, which has been destroyed by petroleum and all the attendant devastation of the urban petro economy.

Ok, class is over - it's allright to drool and sputter and wring our hands again.

Fstvette78:

Give me an example when humankind gave up on something plentiful they have achieved (aside from even poorest citizen having at least three slaves).

We will manage somehow. Always did.

Andy,

The U.S. has about 30 million acres in prarie grass to preserve the soil. We pay farmers to keep it that way. We could harvest the grass, because we want it mostly for its root system. If you can get 100 gallons per ton and 5 tons per acre, that makes a lot of fuel. You can use enzymes and/or gasification. With gasification you can make SNG, methanol, ethanol, gasoline, kerosene or diesel.

Calvino:

Beat it.

All of the blogs on energy/oil/transportation/environment subjects are dominated by dooms-dayers, in most cases terribly illiterate and delusional. This news web site and consequent discussion at least provides you (and fast!) with current news and plenty of information. Just disregard posts which carry only personal opinions not supported by references, and you will find it very helpful and informative.

SJC:  That's still only 15 billion gallons (equivalent to about 10 billion gallons of gasoline).  The US burns over 140 billion gallons of gasoline per year.

Calvino:  I want to see you justify the claim "all the ethanol we want".  I want enough of whatever to replace:

• 100% of gasoline.
• 100% of diesel fuel.
• 100% of coal for electric generation.
• 100% of natural gas for electric generation.
• Industrial feedstocks.

A geat idea from a 'tall skinny kid with a wierd name', as he put it! To the nay sayers it's a great start. If it's worth doing it's worth doing till we get it right Generations 2 and 3.

I think James Woolsey has it right about what will work in the short term. Combine increased production of ethanol from existing technology with cellulosic ethanol from a broadened array of feedstocks using emerging technologies. Couple that with plug-in hybrid vehicles (100+MPG) running on E85 (for an effective 400+MPG per gallon of gasoline). More supply, less demand - gradually shifting from liquid fuels to electricity.

That approach gives us the maximum flexibility for solving the next problem - where all the extra non-fossil fuel produced electricity will come from. But we have alot of untapped capacity at night already so we have time to develop cleaner technologies to solve that problem.

I would agree, do both supply and demand at the same time. Up CAFE by 10%, get to E10 with cellulose and promote PHEVs. It will play on the margins, but with a problem as large as this, it is a start.

Congress needs to legislate based on reality issues that simply are not being addressed:

1. Problem: E85 -> Ethanol = 2/3 energy content of gasoline = 2/3 fuel mileage.
Solution: Ethanol = approx. 106 octane. Higher compression engines will boost efficiency of E85 engines from approximately 70% of gasoline engines to around 80-85%. We could almost live with this loss of efficiency. Pass legislation that all "FFV" engines have ability to run at 15:1 compression ratio when running E85. Variable compression engines?

2. Biodiesel has a 3.2:1 energy out vs. energy in to produce. Gasoline is about .89:1. Ethanol is about 1:1. Algae to Biodiesel is really the only viable option to produce the volume of fuel this nation consumes given the acreage necessary to grow. Restart the NREL Aquatic Species Program and pour money into the research until we get it right (growing, processing, etc.). Make technology developed through this program available to anyone who will use it to be part of the solution.

3. Congress needs to pass legislation to require automobile companies to make diesel engines be readily available. I have B20 supplier in my area and have very few alternatives for diesel powered vehicles. It would be nice to buy an American made car that runs an American made fuel!

4. NREL funding to figure out the cellulosic ethanol issues (what type of plant works best, how to harvest, enzymes to produce ethanol efficiently, etc.). Again, make the technology available to those who wish to be part of the solution.

NREL's budget has been cut every year for 5 years in a row, while Clean Coal at the DOE has been well funded. This shows where the priorities have been.

Good ideas JimF. Let's remember though that the NREL ASP run by DOE took various short-sighted, uninspired views of microalgal resource production. Yes, give it another chance, but provide grants for private sector research simultaneously. Algal resource grants can stipulate that findings/patents be licensable to all comers.

The DOE programs must be challenged by the entrepreneur who often do the same work, smarter, faster and cheaper (check out Virgin Galactic and Burt Rutan's swingtail re-entry vehicle, ahem NASA). Government needs to compete in the new alt fuel economy the way independents must. Throwing more taxpayer dollars at the same players won't solve the problems.

And it would be encouraging to see this legislation include as many tax incentives, credits and loan gurantees for biofuel production as offered to the CTL industry.

Obama's work on both these bills does suggest a heavy bias toward plain old carbon consumption instead of transition to renewable fuels.

Dont assume Obama wont address the demand side.In the last year dozens of energy bills were piling up.Nobody wanted to pass them until after the elections where they hoped to get the credit.Obama is in the majority and can pass his bills and get the credit that he will use to run for president.He has put two bills out now.The dems have decided to run them out one at a time rather than wait for an omnibus energy bill.I say say put em out there and lets see something get done rather than dem and repub internecine warfare while Rome burns.

An Engineer,
Yeah, I saw that on Bloomberg. The traders on CBOT (and elsewhere), farmers, livestock operations, and the processed foods industry will repond to this report.

Much of the corn used for ethanol is non-irrigated. That will change as demand will force them to reach for irrigated corn. Irrigation will have a negative impact on the EROEI, dropping it down to 1:1, or perhaps even negative. Demand for water goes up, and you may see Great Plains aquifers levels drop even faster.

Obama did have a bill last year that called for helping car companies with retiree health care in exchange for more hybrids. This is a bit of a demand side play.

Consider that eliminating CAFE would have an effect similar to a fuel tax (not that this is possible). Consumption would rise, prices also, and consumers respond. This would be more painful to consumers and less efficient than higher CAFE, which is itself more painful to automakers and less efficient than consumers buying more efficient vehicles in the first place. Currently KPMG and other survey groups claim US consumers and auto execs believe efficiency concerns are here to stay. We'll see it in the yearly purchased fleet mileage averages...

SJC, aren't enzymes plant specific? Also you don't have to limit the mixed prairie grass crop to what is now used for soil preservation. My point was that picking alcohols as biofuel outputs after those findings appears to be a really bad idea.

Even if we have to import biofuels to meet a target like this, it would tend to greatly improve energy security. The countries who could supply these type of inputs are much more diverse than the petroleum producers.

Since there appears to be another Andy, I'll change my name.

Don't these Congressmen EVER keep up with technology?
Why are they pushing to continue an expensive, and soon to be redundent energy distribution system that is vastly more inefficient than our electrical system powering electric cars? Maybe they hate the idea of putting all those folks and all that equipment we all have to support for creating out liquid fuels, transporting it and storing it and selling it. We don't really want to continue paying for all that soon to be useless rigamaroll. I guess it was just a matter ot time before the new Congress began proving that it was composed of morons, as per usual. Doesn't anyone in Washington ever think things thru before they rush to
do something to prove to the public that they're doing
something?

Enzymes for cellulosic aren't plant-specific AFAIK, but they are not very efficient compared to those which hydrolize starches to sugars.  Two big problems are the poor processing of both hemicellulose (made of C5 sugars) and lignin; the former is fermented by only a few tailored yeasts, and the latter not at all.

Corn based Bio-Fuel will be around only tell we run short of food to eat and then Congress will drop corn based ethanol mandates. It’s going to be a huge task to replace the 200 billion or so gals we currently use in this country. Bio-Fuels will only be part of the solution here. Import oil/fuel dependence: USA 60%, Europe 80%, and Japan 100%. PHEV and BEV based vehicles are really the only way we are going to get off our oil dependence without having to switch over to mass transit for most people (New York City). Our electrical power will come from Coal, Natural Gas, Hydro, and Nuclear based power plants for decades to come. Congress only listens to people and businesses that give them money! They will get around to increasing MPG requirements no of these days, but they will never increase gas taxes by any huge amount ($3 to $5) per gallon because they would be toast in the election cycle. Anyway, the only way we are going to cut GHG by some big amount (25% to 50%) will be going big time Nuke power.

Toyota and some battery companies etc. Are solving the fuel problems in response to a minority of informed people. On the other hand the politicians will not help because whatever they do must be seen as benefiting in the short term or least not costing much too more than 50% pf the voters (mostly uninformed). When Toyota et al have solved the problem to the point where more than 50% of the people already have the solution congress will act and claim that they made it happen, taking credit. (Same as with cigarette smoking. Smoking rates fell and fell for a long time before the levels of smoking got low enough for the politicians to safely act. )

If we can get to E10 by gasifiying prairie grass, great. If we can promote hybrids and PHEV all the better. CAFE tends to put the burden on auto makers and must by why they fight it so hard. Maybe we can help the car makers do the right thing and all come out ahead.

Engineer - i was sitting outside the municipal dump with my buddy who was writing out the thermo dynamics for the good old Fischer-Troepsch on the back of a milk carton. We like to drink milk outside dumps. He concluded the milk carton would be good to get us home if only we could convert it to ethanol. However where, oh where are we going to get the feedstock for all the fuel we need?? - as three more long trailers carted off leaves to the incinerator. hmmm - where would we get the grass clipping, the rotting wood, the fallen leaves to convert to biofuel. I am coming to understand that you must live in arizona to miss these obvious things, however here, in the northeast, and the rest of the deciduous USA, which is most of it, we have all kinds of feedstock, year after year, and it just appears all on its own. The prairie grass - well sure we can cut that, however we already have several hundred million tons of high carbon feestock lovingly collected by suburbanites, all on their own account. Now think about the total biomass available as you peer over your shoulder on the highway, anywhere except in your home state of the Sonora desert.
I do not know why you think I want to derive all our all energy from biofuel. I said we can have all the biofuel we need, which we use for transport, which is different.