Knowing is half the battle: Cellulosic ethanol

Every day now it seems that the less than informed masses continue their slow bovine shuffle towards the trend of corn ethanol. Of course it’s a white house win-win because it keeps on burning oil just as much as ever, if not more, and it makes the lobbyists happy. However, it’s important to remember that corn ethanol is really not efficient at all. You know all the usual stuff - takes as much oil to make as it allegedly saves, throws our agriculture industry off balance, and it’s silly to go through all this effort for no gain. All this is why I was very excited to see cellulosic ethanol on ecogeek.org today.  There are several crops that can produce ethanol far more efficiently than the one we illogically are promoting here in the USA. This is not a wonder solution as it is a bit difficult for large scale use yet. I’m just happy to have another viable option on the horizon.  Maybe if we get enough of these options we’ll get some informed action soon. Anyways, check out the whole article if you want to geek out on cellulosic ethanol.

Cellulosic ethanol can contain up to 16 times more energy than is required to create it! If that doesn’t sound ridiculously impressive, consider that gasoline contains only 5 times more energy than was required to create it and corn ethanol is totally lame, containing only 1.3 times the energy required to create it.

- shawn

[source: ecogeek]