Heyo!!! Here's a little snippet of what you can find on my new website / broadcast radio feature to be hitting the airwaves this Tuesday, April 22nd (URF DAY!!!) It's called Green Air and it's a burst of Green FIRE to the 26 million listeners of CBS News radio affiliates (http://www.greenairradio.com):
Why hasn't someone perfected this yet??? It's sounds TOO PERFECT!!! All those sweet smelling summer grass clippings mowed up like so much of the earth's hair at the galactic barber shop could actually get you from Dallas to Denver?The excitement around the American switchgrass fuel solution fertilizes even the most withered skeptics. What many don't realize, however, 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.
(CBS - Brazil is World's Ethanol Superpower) http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/03/13/tech/main1394254.shtml
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.
(Wikipedia - Henry Ford Bio) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Ford
The question for ethanol producers in the US, Chevron being the largest, is not can they make it but rather how potent and effeceintly can it be made. What Brazil has is a lot of sugar cane, a plant easily processed into a strong batch of ethanol. What America has is a lot of corn, a plant 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.
(USDA Rurual Development - Ethanol from Sugar) http://www.rurdev.usda.gov/rbs/pub/sep06/ethanol.htm
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. With inefficient production in place for corn conversion and only a few million acres of sugar cane and sugar beet produced domestically each year, the US ethanol solution seems to drift further and further away from practicality.
(Brazil Sugar Chart, Soy/Corn US Chart pics)
Enter: switch grass. 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.
(Chemical & Engineering News - Cellulosic Ethanol Deemed Feasible, 2008) http://pubs.acs.org/cen/science/86/8603sci2.html
Before planning the 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 water, land, and solar energy innovations.
Links:
cbsnews.com
msnbc.com
wikipedia.com
rurdev.com
mongabay.com
ers.usda.gov
havestcleanenergy.org
pubs.acs.org
DORK LORD