They may have relied on much taller grass (10+ ft instead of 4 ft) from much high CO2 level (700+ ppm instead of 380 ppm) in the not too distant future?

"The giant miscanthus was developed at the University of Mississippi..."

There is no telling what this plant does to the land, there is NO free lunch. Switch grass is native to the plains states and as such can grow almost anywhere.

This species is not indigenous and thus might just need LOTS more nutrients, you can not grow 10 feet tall by pulling the needed ingredients out of thin air, so to speak.

Also from wikipedia: "M. giganteus is a C4 plant, and thus exhibits greater photosynthetic efficiency and lower water use requirements than other kinds of plants.[2] It has very low nutritional requirements – it has high nitrogen use efficiency and therefore is capable of growing well on barren land without the aid of heavy fertilization. M. giganteus is a sterile hybrid, and therefore propagates vegetatively through its rhizomes.[3] This quality makes it attractive for growth in areas foreign to M. giganteus – it is a completely non-invasive species. Additional researched benefits of M. giganteus include its ability to sequester carbon into the earth.[4]"

"C4 carbon fixation is one of three biochemical mechanisms, along with C3 and CAM photosynthesis, used in carbon fixation. It is named for the 4-carbon molecule present in the first product of carbon fixation in these plants, in contrast to the 3-carbon molecule products in C3 plants.

C4 fixation is an elaboration of the more common C3 carbon fixation and is believed to have evolved more recently. C4 and CAM overcome the tendency of the enzyme RuBisCO to wastefully fix oxygen rather than carbon dioxide in what is called photorespiration. This is achieved by using a more efficient enzyme to fix CO2 in mesophyll cells and shuttling this fixed carbon via malate or asparate to bundle-sheath cells. In these bundle-sheath cells, RuBisCO is isolated from atmospheric oxygen and saturated with the CO2 released by decarboxylation of the malate or oxaloacetate. These additional steps, however, require more energy in the form of ATP. Because of this extra energy requirement, C4 plants are able to more efficiently fix carbon in only certain conditions, with the more common C3 pathway being more efficient in other conditions."

Those "certain conditions" are full sun and moist fertile soil, in plant hardiness zones 5 to 9 - which fortunately cover most of the US.

Im interrested to buy synthetic gasoline.

It sounds good, I guess with absolutely ideal conditions, this could result. I am not sure I would want to set expectations in this way for investors and customers, but to see what can be done, it might be a worthwhile exercise.

ejj said: "... & I don't see federal government involvement anywhere so I bet they are speaking the truth."

I don't follow your logic at all. Do you think companies which are 100% privately funded don't have motivation to lie or exaggerate? Was Enron corrupted by federal money?

Getting back to the article, I can only hope it is true, but it is such a dramatic increase over current state of the art I'd want to see some independent confirmation of their claims.

"Agricultural waste from food crops can also produce up to 1,000 gallons of gasoline/acre using this new technology."

"Other advanced bio-energy crops, such as sorghum..."

I would favor biomass stalks from a feed crop be used to get double duty from the land. Since there are 500 million pasture land acres and perhaps 100 million could be planted in grasses we might just have a future fuel source.

They plan to return the carbon to the land for more fertile soil, which is a good idea. Years ago I outlined a vision of bio processing plants every 10 by 10 miles in the growing regions of the country. I was told it would never work for various reasons, maybe it just might.

Not a new idea by-the-way; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54vD_cPCQM8

USA is currently one of about one dozen country with enough farm land to produce biomass for a very large portion of the liquid fuel required today. However, at the current growth rate, USA will have 520 million people to feed in 2050 and over 800 million by 2100.

Secondly, what would be the biomass production by acre after 10 years if the 100 million acres are not regularly fertilized at a very high financial and environmental cost?

Regardless of the drawbacks, it could be one of the way to reduce fossil fuel imports.

Fascinating hemp videos, however the US is too busy being the world's leading imprisoner per capita to consider.

@HarveyD

"USA will have 520 million people to feed in 2050 and over 800 million by 2100."

Where did you get these numbers? The US birth rate is currently slightly below replacement rate. The only reason why our population is still growing is net in migration and that is also slowing. I would expect a nearly stable population or longer term maybe a slowly shrinking population but then it also hard to make predictions (especially about the future:).

I'm a retired native grass seed farmer, so perhaps I can help with understanding of perennial grass biomass. Miscanthus giganteus is a naturally occurring sterile hybrid of M. sinensis and M. sachariflorus. Its sterility is a real asset for biomass production, since it doesn't put any energy into seed production. This allows it to produce a large volume of biomass and carbon sequestration on very low nutrient inputs. Test plots at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign produce 25 tonnes per hectare, without any fertilizer, tillage, or irrigation input, while sequestering 4 tonnes of carbon per year. This is a yield of almost 11 tons per acre, or more than twice the average corn crop in that area. M. giganteus grows to 12 feet tall and is harvested after full senescence, when all the leaves have dropped and only stalks are left.

Switchgrass, Panicum virgatum, a native perennial and a crop I used to grow, produces about half as much biomass as M. giganteus. However, as I explained to the researchers, they were growing the wrong cultivar and should switch to a southern variety to trigger phenological sterility. Field trials in Quebec have shown that southern cultivars produce the highest biomass yield. Switchgrass is very cold tolerant and can stand being moved north. Switchgrass has the advantage of being a better soil stabilizer and wildlife habitat creater than M. giganteus and can be etablished from seed. M. giganteus has to be established from root stocks.

These are both C4 photosynthesis pathway plants, which means they use a two-stage process, the second part of which operates at night. However, the chemistry requires ambient temperatures above 10 degrees C, which is why plantings in high elevation Wyoming won't work. It's too cold at night. The test plots at CoolPlanet are in southern California with year-round growing season, so biomass production can be very high, although irrigation would be required during the dry season, if the plantings are not on high water-table soils.