Government promotes home grown fuel

Like us on Facebook

Emphasis is on perennials, including trees and other nonfood plants that can be used as dedicated biofuel crops. Since such crops tend to require less intensive production practices and can grow on somewhat poorer quality land than food crops, they will be a critical element in a strategy of sustainable biofuels production that avoids competition with crops grown for food.

Combining DOE's leadership in genome-scale technologies with USDA's long experience in crop improvement will help accelerate development of such specialized crops and improve their effectiveness as feedstocks for biofuels production, government officials said.

Myke Feinman, publisher of the Illinois-based Biofuels Journal, said the government investment is a welcome development.

"When a nation can produce its own energy, it is a more secure and freer nation," Feinman said. "Right now, the United States is horribly dependent on foreign sources for its fuel. With biofuels, we can grow our own energy."

Feinman explained that what the government is looking for is the genetic alteration of nonfood plants so that the parts used for biofuel, the sugars of the plant, are more readily extractable from the rest of the plant.

"We already grow 10 percent of our fuel. That's ethanol, extracted from feed corn," Feinman said. "Roughly one third of the corn kernel becomes ethanol, one third is protein which is still used for animal feed, and one third is CO2 and other gases released in the separation process."

Feinman said the biofuels the government is seeking to develop will be similar in some ways to ethanol.

"We're talking second generation, advanced biofuels," he said.

It takes less energy to produce ethanol than it does to produced petroleum, and less energy to produce non-corn-based biofuels than it does to produce ethanol.

"The process is much less expensive," he said. "There is a debate, however, on how much pollution is produced by ethanol compared to petroleum."

The CO2 by-product of ethanol and other biofuel production is a greenhouse gas and ethanol is therefore a cause of pollution.

"All in all, the pollution produced by biofuels is drastically less than that produced by oil refining and the emissions from gasoline," Feinman said. "The bottom line is that using biofuels is much healthier, and it will make the nation less dependent on other nations' resources."

Feinman said strong evidence that the development and promotion of biofuels is sounder national policy is that all branches of the military are moving to increase biofuel use.

DOE's Office of Science will provide $6.9 million in funding for seven projects, while USDA's National Institute of Food and Agriculture will award $2 million to fund two projects. Initial funding will support research projects for up to three years.

DOE-funded projects include:

• USDA-ARS Western Regional Research Center, Albany, CA, $949,348
• University of California, Berkeley, CA, $793,413
• University of Delaware, Newark, DE, $868,794
• University of Georgia, Athens, GA, $1,340,000
• University of Illinois, Champaign, Il, $1,165,900
• University of Missouri, Columbia, MO, $1,106,656
• Institute for Advanced Learning and Research, Danville, VA, $734,759

USDA-funded projects include:

• University of Illinois, Champaign, Il, $1,000,000
• Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, $1,000,000