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POPSSugarcane: Nutrition and Health Benefits When one thinks of sugarcane, automatically it is sweetness. Sugar is the by-product of sugarcane. It is an essential food for almost everyone, just like salt but disdain by diabetics. Some may or may not know the nutrition value and benefits of sugarcane and its by-products, but definitely, we knew that it is one of the best sources of energy.
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POPSFueling Cars with Feces The “Q microbe,” as it came to be known, is no ordinary bug. It can ingest—and produce ethanol from—virtually anything that contains cellulose, including human and animal sewage waste. So Qteros, the company Leschine founded to exploit the microbe’s abilities commercially, struck up a partnership with Applied CleanTech (ACT), an Israeli firm that generates alternative energy from wastewater solids. ACT’s sewage-recycling system transforms solids into “recyllose.” It turns out the Q microbe has a sweet tooth for recyllose, converting the cotton-like substance into ethanol for use in automobiles. Jeff Hausthor, Qteros’ lead researcher, imagines a uniquely local market for this new biofuel. Obviously, waste materials are a burden to farms and municipalities, both financially and ecologically. But by putting the Q microbe to work, small-scale ethanol plants situated around sewage processing plants could become a reality.
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POPSNew Positive Way To Use Tobacco Leaves Researchers at Thomas Jefferson University’s Biotechnology Foundation Laboratories have genetically modified tobacco plant leaves to produce significantly more oil, proving that the plant could serve as biofuel feedstock.
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POPSOrganic Waste Ethanol Cellulosic ethanol is an exciting technology which promises to convert the abundant sources of organic waste worldwide (kitchen waste, yard waste, paper industry waste, etc.) into green alternative fuel. Unlike traditional ethanol, it won't use food crops or raise food prices. In addition, environmental impact studies have indicated that while traditional ethanol releases more greenhouse gases than burning fossil fuels, cellulosic ethanol could reduce emissions
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POPSOppose Climate Alarmist Gore: Sign Free Petition Worried about high food prices, Congress tries to push the biofuel industry to use nonfood crops. Chicago - America's love affair with corn-based ethanol is cooling – at least in Washington. Some legislators blame the rising use of corn as a biofuel as a key factor behind high food prices. Others want to freeze the federal mandate on biofuels production at current levels, reversing legislation passed just a few months ago that increases it through 2022. Still others are pushing to shift tax incentives away from corn-based to cellulose-based ethanol in the nearly completed farm bill. These moves represent a dramatic backlash against corn ethanol, which until a few months ago was widely viewed as a boon for both farmers and consumers. Many experts worry that Washington's new skepticism will undo important progress the US has made in replacing foreign oil with domestic energy alternatives. http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0501/p03s03-usec.html
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POPSCongress Considers Cellulose Ethanol In the Cato-at-Liberty blog post "Wishful Thinking on Cellulosic Ethanol," Indur Goklany, author of the Cato book The Improving State of the World, writes: "If cellulosic ethanol proves to be as profitable as its backers hope, farmers will divert even more land and water to producing the cellulose instead of food. All this means we'll be more or less back to where we were. Food will once again be competing with fuel. And land and water will be diverted from the rest of nature to meet the human demand for fuel.
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POPSControversial genetic engineering aim for new energy source Environmentalists say such work can be risky, because lignin provides trees with structural stiffness and resistance to pests. Even some scientists working on altering wood composition acknowledge that reducing lignin too much could lead to wobbly, vulnerable trees.
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POPSEngineered Microbes Boost Yeast-Tolerant Ethanol Improving yeast-ethanol tolerance is difficult because it is a complicated trait involving many genes. To tailor the expression of many genes at once, Stephanopoulos uses a process to induce random mutations in the genes for master regulator proteins. Each of these proteins controls the expression of multiple genes, so by altering them, Stephanopoulos sets off a cascade of changes in gene expression widespread enough to alter a trait like ethanol tolerance. The researchers randomly changed these proteins in a large yeast population, which led to some with an increased tolerance for ethanol.
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POPSThe plug-in hybrid-vehicle era begins For years, hobbyists and a few companies have been adding bigger battery packs to hybrid vehicles, which have both battery power and an internal combustion engine, and plugging them into electrical outlets. The idea of the "plug-in hybrid" has now caught the attention of government officials and researchers, who note that gas consumption would plummet if drivers could rely almost exclusively on electricity for average daily driving of about 33 miles.
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POPSWill Cellulosic Ethanol Take Off? That's good news because many experts estimate that corn-ethanol producers will run out of land, in part because of competing demand for corn-based food, limiting the total production to about 15 billion gallons of fuel. (Already, corn-ethanol plants--existing and planned, combined--have a capacity of about 11 billion gallons.) The greater productivity of cellulosic sources should eventually allow them to produce as much as 150 billion gallons of ethanol by 2050, according to a report by the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC). Cellulosic-ethanol companies are hopeful that they can meet this goal.
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POPSCheaper, Cleaner Ethanol from Biotech Corn If the researchers are able to overcome some of these challenges, the biotech corn could lead to more-efficient production of ethanol, starting by making better use of corn kernels. Much of the corn kernel contains cellulose that isn't converted into ethanol in conventional ethanol plants. Some developers are considering adding equipment to existing ethanol plants for processing this corn-grain cellulose.
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