Clean-tech and Ethanol production

If it were not for the high rising gasoline price and increasing foreign oil dependency, ethanol production would not likely make any market buzz. And even to these days, many people still insist that it does not make any BTU (British thermal unit) sense to even make ethanol from corn, let alone corn stover etc. biomass. If BTU is truly the only deciding factor of what's supposed to be made and what's not, many of us probably should never buy diamond rings for wives since when we thought about how many BTU went into the small stone?

Luckily, economic cool head prevails. Today we see new technologies that can effectively transform even hard to process biomass (the grass things in your backyard, waste papers, tree branches etc.) into ethanol and do so with 90%+ conversion rate.

Dr. Nancy Ho of purdue university made breakthrough progress in the area of co-converting glucose and xylose into ethanol together and co-producing enzymes from abundant and inexpensive biomass. Corn based ethanol production rides on the Demand and Supply curve of international corn production and can only supply 6B gallon of ethanol before it drives up the corn price too high. On the other hand, MTBE phase-out will generate a market in the size of 13B gallon ethanol per year in the US alone. So biomass is the sure way to go.

To many of us, we will see ethanol added gasoline more often than not in the next few years. I certainly care much about the per dollar mileage number when driving my SUV. Ethanol will give my some sanity until the next better gasoline alternatives come around.