Biofuel News - Biofuel Race, The - New York Times
Biofuel News - Biofuel Race,
For millennia, civilization’s main event, the harvest, has focused our attention upon the fruit of our agricultural efforts — the kernel, the grain, busheled and bagged. The vogue for corn ethanol has driven up the price of corn around the world, putting the poor in jeopardy. In 2007, significant steps were taken toward a potentially great second harvest, some of it coming from the byproducts of animals, some of it from municipal waste and garbage but the bulk of it coming from plant biomass, which is really about breaking down cellulose, the key structural component of all plant cell walls and the most abundant of all naturally occurring organic compounds on earth. A recent Department of Energy study found the United States can produce a billion tons of plant biomass annually, yet 400 million years of evolution has made cellulose resistant — the term of art is “recalcitrant” — to manipulation. Until now — at least if you believe Vinod Khosla, one of the best-known venture capitalists in America, who was a founder of Sun Microsystems and an early investor in Google, and who has in recent years invested hundreds of millions of dollars into a dozen different biofuel companies using new and potentially revolutionary techniques. According to Khosla, within the next two decades, petroleum, which accounts for 40 percent of the current total energy use in the United States, can be entirely replaced by biofuels.
