Cellulosic Ethanol

Factual Questions
1

What is the current state of the art in cellulosic ethanol production? What would it take to make an efficient plant?

Thanks for your help,
Rob

2

A big digester and lots of microbes?

3

Cute. At what rate would the bugs need to metabolize cellulose to make industrial-sized quantities of Ethanol? How much juice would a plant need to turn out to compare to a refinery? How many plants with using current technology would be needed to fuel the current fleet assuming every vehicle could run on E85? I understand that you need to produce about a third again of alcohol to equal the energy equivalent of gas.

Thanks for your help,
Rob

4

The Promise of Cellulosic Ethanol (PDF)

They still need to pretreat the feedstock with heat and acid or enzymes in order to get something the bugs can eat. If you believe the article, enzyme prices have come down to the point where ethanol can be produced from cellulose for 10-20 cents per gallon.

5

That gets to something else I want to know. Should I believe the article?

6

Well, it doesn’t seem to be utter woo woo, yet there’s obviously some positive spin going on. It looks to be a pretty good general review of the state of the art, but still there’s the spin. I’d stick it in the ‘trust but verify’ category; generally accurate, but when it comes to specifics that are really important to you, be sure to check that the sources are as good as the article claims they are, and that the numbers aren’t outliers unique to this single source.

7

Unfortunately, all I have to go on are either these types of brochures or articles that seem to quote straight from these brochures or Cecil’s column about corn ethanol the point of which is to say that all ethanol does is make ADM rich. I originally posted this question to Cecil directly since I feel like the aforementioned article might have been overtaken by events since it only talks about corn ethanol.

Is cellulosic alcohol a good thing? Can it stabilize CO2 emissions? Can it enable us to tell despotic Middle Eastern regimes and their yahoo opposition to go take a collective flying leap?

This is really a policy question. Where should be putting our efforts with regard to transportation energy? Solving the H2 transportation and storage problem? Building better hybrids? Figuring out how to commercialize ultracapacitors? Corn oil?

Thanks for your help,
Rob