I was waiting for this to happen. One of the major stumbling blocks to efficient production of biofuels is the conversion of bulky biomass into ethanol. GM bacteria that can condense this complex process into a single multi-course meal have been in the works for some time already.
Now the major agricultural biotechs are jumping into the game with plants designed specifically to be energy crops.
Syngenta, DuPont, Monsanto and others all have plans -- some incorporating GM, others using traditional breeding techniques -- to synthesize tomorrow's energy in a plant cell.
Syngenta wants to engineer a "self-processing" corn that essentially converts itself into ethanol when the time is right. DuPont will start designing soybeans for biodiesel, and Ceres is interested in creating switchgrass that is even better than the conventional variety when it comes to yield-per-acre of cellulosic ethanol.
A perennial grass I've never heard of called miscanthus and the recently sequenced poplar tree are also considered good candidates for energy crops. Genetic engineering of these plants is a bit more dicey than in the case of annuals, however, since the live longer and spread their seed more easily.
Whether you take this development as hopeful or heinous, one thing is sure: agribusiness is likely to get a major PR boost from these projects. As the editors of Nature Biotechnology recently said, "it's difficult to oppose a technology that's helping to save the planet."
Comments
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Biodiversivist Posted 4:10 am
08 Sep 2006
Or, did I miss something?
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Help acquire and protect ecological hotspots, give to a conservation organization: http://www.saveourbiodiversity.com
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Maywa Montenegro Posted 1:25 pm
08 Sep 2006
If I'm not mistaken, though, I'm preaching to the choir when it comes to the benefits of cellulosic ethanol.
What I remain uncertain about is what to make of these recent attempts to genetically engineer switchgrass et al. to be even better than they are already. I believe that the goal here is indeed to make these GM varieties less resource-intensive, which will be a bonus for the environment. On the other hand, the nature of perennial trees and grasses makes GM cross-contamination a likely scenario...
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sdsavage Posted 8:51 am
09 Sep 2006
If we want energy security and to make progress on global warming and to still have plenty of land for food I think we need to employ our best technology skills and environmental experience to make highly productive biofuel crops. That will involve a wide range of technological advances, only one of which may be biotech.
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JMG Posted 9:27 am
10 Sep 2006
The entire ethanol enterprise, whether corn or cellulosic, is devoted to ensuring that business as usual continues: that we can keep sprawling out over the landscape, keep chauffering our food an average of 1500 miles, keep the entire carburban project going, right down to the strip malls and the gigantic box stores full of cheap plastic crap from China.
After the "technology will save us" gospel of the economists, ethanomania is probably the next most dangerous fantasy, because it will absorb all the capital and resources that should be going towards a radical reorientation of society vis a vis energy use. ("Clean coal" is the next one.)
For those interested in looking into the claims and evaluating them, there is no better website that the i-r-squared blog by Robert Rapier, a chemical engineer. While he is hopeful that perhaps cellulosic ethanol can someday be made to pay, he notes that, even if it did, the excess energy produced is so low that the "ethanol economy" doesn't differ all that much from one without ethanol (unless you count all the coal burned in distilling the ethanol).
Just as "Stay the course and hope for the best" is savage idiocy in Iraq, so too is "Keep funding research and hope for the best" an inadequate policy for our energy dependence.
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For just a good sample article, see http://i-r-squared.blogspot.com/2006/08/guest-post-on-cel...
The following is a guest post by Don Augenstein and John Benemann. They have many years of expertise in biomass conversion. This essay is in response to Vinod Khosla's recent posting on ethanol. In my opinion, it is an excellent essay. First is the introduction by Don Augenstein.
Introduction
This post presents a perspective on ethanol from lignocellulose by my friend and co-worker, John Benemann. We have worked on, and been immersed in, biofuels and analyses of fuels from biomass processes for over 3 decades. We are to substantial degrees biotechnologists, as well as chemical engineers and have successful processes going today (methane from wastes. You can google Don Augenstein).
We have worked long and hard on biofuels for entities including Exxon (long ago), the Electric Power Research Institute, and others. Our carefully considered view, for which we will be happy to provide abundant evidence is that severe barriers remain to ethanol from lignocellulose. The barriers look as daunting as they did 30 years ago. Ethanol from lignocellulose may indeed come to pass. But the odds against are so dismal that a hydrocarbon fueled 200 mile per gallon passenger automobile would be more likely to be developed. (much more ....)
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JMG Posted 10:28 am
10 Sep 2006
Kew boss: 'World must wake up to the dangers of biofuels'
Source: Copyright 2006, Independent (UK)
Date: September 9, 2006
http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/article1431083....
The world should wake up to the dangers of the mass production of biofuels, which are increasingly seen as a major solution to global warming, according to Professor Sir Peter Crane, director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.
Extensive production of biofuel crops, such as oil palms, could destroy remaining areas of rainforest and bring about a new cycle of worldwide intensive agriculture involving vast applications of artificial fertilisers and pesticides, and requiring enormous water resources, said Professor Crane, who as the head of Kew Gardens is the world's leading plant scientist.
"There are big opportunities with biofuels, but there are big problems too," he said. "It's not a free lunch."
Professor Crane, 52, is retiring from Kew after seven very successful years to take up a chair at the University of Chicago, and gave his biofuels warning as part of a valedictory interview with The Independent.
It comes at a critical moment. The production of road transport fuels made from crops, which do not add to the greenhouse gases causing global warming, is now starting to take off around the globe, and is likely to grow vastly. It will be one of the main agricultural developments of the 21st century.
The attraction of biofuels in the fight against climate change is that they are "carbon neutral". Unlike the fossil fuels, oil, gas and coal, which when burnt add to the net amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the CO2 which biofuels produce when ignited has been absorbed from the atmosphere by the crops used to make them, and so the net atmospheric amount is not increased.
The best known biofuels are ethanol, a petrol substitute made from sugar cane, sugar beet or maize, widely used in Brazil and coming into use in many other countries, and biodiesel, which is made from oil palms, oilseed rape or recycled vegetable oil.
American output of ethanol from maize is now rising at 30 per cent a year; Germany is raising output of biodiesel by nearly 50 per cent a year and China has built the world's biggest ethanol plant. Britain jumped on to the biofuels bandwagon this year with an obligation on British petrol companies to blend a fixed proportion of biofuels with all the petrol and diesel that they sell on garage forecourts.
But Sir Peter sounded a strongly cautionary note about the new developments. "If we're serious about biofuels, we're going to have to produce them in a much more sustainable way than intensive agriculture has given us in the past," he said.
He voiced a concern which has already been highlighted by some environmental groups - that mass expansion of biofuel production might lead to a new round of rainforest destruction, especially with crops such as oil palm.
Oil palm needs warm humid conditions and is largely grown in south-east Asia on land from which rainforest has been cleared. "Expansion of oil palm production is going to have to be handled extremely carefully to ensure that it doesn't start to eat into the remaining pieces of rainforest that still exist," Professor Crane said.
He went on: "We're going to have to get biofuels off land that's already degraded, perhaps land that's not valuable for other purposes, for conservation or for agriculture. And we've got to do it without creating other problems with the kinds of inputs that in the past have gone into intensive agriculture."
It was possible that intensive biofuel production might involve too much nitrogen-based fertiliser, pesticides and herbicides, in order to get the desired level of production, he said, as well as taking up enormous amounts of scarce water in irrigation. . . .
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