Gasoline as a Biofuel?

Imagine a world where vehicles run on beer. Some might think of this as a devastating waste of good hops, but a University of Maryland (UMD) team sees a lot of promise for the idea. The team has been awarded a patent for a process that uses natural microorganisms to ferment biomass or gases into hydrocarbons. In short, they've figured out how to brew gasoline naturally.

The inventors, Professor Richard Kohn and Faculty Research Associate Dr. Seon-Woo Kim, are at the University of Maryland, had been awarded a patent for microorganisms that are ethanol-tolerant and which produce ethanol from biomass materials. The team has now been awarded a similar patent for the same process, but producing hexane and octane, the core ingredients of gasoline. In both cases, the fuels separate from the biomass and rise to the surface of a fermentation broth.

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Cardiff University Produces new Catalyst to Improve Biodiesel Yields

Biofuels can be made from various source materials such as waste from the winemaking industry and woody biomass. Reseachers are also looking for new methods to improve its environmental credentials as there is still controversy as to how green biofuels really are. Now, a team at the Catalysis Institute at Cardiff University is hoping to make biofuel production more efficient and sustainable by recycling the leftovers from the process.

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Improving Photosynthesis Through Biotech for Food and Bio Fuels

Redesigning photosynthesis to sustainably meet global food and bioenergy demand

Authors:

Ort et al

Abstract:

The world’s crop productivity is stagnating whereas population growth, rising affluence, and mandates for biofuels put increasing demands on agriculture. Meanwhile, demand for increasing cropland competes with equally crucial global sustainability and environmental protection needs. Addressing this looming agricultural crisis will be one of our greatest scientific challenges in the coming decades, and success will require substantial improvements at many levels. We assert that increasing the efficiency and productivity of photosynthesis in crop plants will be essential if this grand challenge is to be met. Here, we explore an array of prospective redesigns of plant systems at various scales, all aimed at increasing crop yields through improved photosynthetic efficiency and performance. Prospects range from straightforward alterations, already supported by preliminary evidence of feasibility, to substantial redesigns that are currently only conceptual, but that may be enabled by new developments in synthetic biology. Although some proposed redesigns are certain to face obstacles that will require alternate routes, the efforts should lead to new discoveries and technical advances with important impacts on the global problem of crop productivity and bioenergy production.

CELF Process: a Novel Pretreatment Could cut Costs for Biofuels by 30%

Researchers at the University of California, Riverside have invented a novel pretreatment technology that could cut the cost of biofuels production by about 30 percent or more by dramatically reducing the amount of enzymes needed to breakdown the raw materials that form biofuels.

As partners in the BioEnergy Science Center (BESC), the team from the Bourns College of Engineering Department of Chemical and Environmental Engineering and Center for Environmental Research and Technology (CE-CERT) have shown that this new operation called Co-solvent Enhanced Lignocellulosic Fractionation (CELF) could eliminate about 90 percent of the enzymes needed for biological conversion of lignocellulosic biomass to fuels compared to prior practice. This development could mean reducing enzyme costs from about $1 per gallon of ethanol to about 10 cents or less.

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EU Caps 7% of Transport Fuels can be Food-derived BioFuels

EU energy ministers agreed on Friday to limit production of biofuels made from food crops, responding to criticism they stoke inflation and do more environmental harm than good.

The ministers' endorsement of a compromise deal overcomes a stalemate hit late last year, when European Union governments failed to agree on a proposed 5 percent cap on the use of biofuels based on crops such as maize or rapeseed.

Friday's agreement would set a 7 percent limit on food-based biofuels in transport fuel.

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Biofuels not Really a Help With Climate Change?

The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has for the first time acknowledged the risks of uncontrolled biofuels development, a skepticism that has slowly emerged into the mainstream scientific community, say academics.

IPCC's Working Group II report, released this morning in Yokohama, Japan, indicates that the U.N. scientific body on climate change has loosened its 2007 position that defines biofuels as a mitigation strategy for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

The report affirms that the science that has raised questions around the sustainability of biofuels in the last six years, said Jeremy Martin, a senior scientist in the Union of Concerned Scientists' Clean Vehicles program.

"I think that's switched from being something novel and controversial to something that is common sense," he said.

A table from the report was leaked last week in which authors list the potential negative risks of development. These issues include indirect land-use change, the conflicts between land for fuels and land for food, water scarcity, loss of biodiversity and nitrogen pollution through the use of excess fertilizer.

Sixty-two countries have biofuel targets or mandates. Environmental and anti-poverty groups like Oxfam and the Environmental Working Group have long opposed biofuel mandates because the groups believe they push up prices for food. Government-backed biofuel programs allow fuel crops to compete with food crops for resources like water and land, they say.

Although Martin is conscious of biofuels' potential to compete for land and emit pollution, he does not reject them outright. He is supportive of the federal renewable fuel standard, the United States' biofuel mandate to produce 36 billion gallons per year by 2022, and has backed the expansion of E85 pumps, stations that supply 85 percent ethanol fuel.

"It would be a mistake to read this report as a repudiation or an about-face," he said. "Biofuels are not going to go away, so rather than looking for a thumbs-up/thumbs-down assessment, policymakers need to be smart about the scale and specific sources of biofuels when they make and implement policies to reduce impacts and manage risks."

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Enterobacter lignolyticus: A Lignin Eating Microbe With Biofuel Production Potential

Nature designed lignin, the tough woody polymer in the walls of plant cells, to bind and protect the cellulose sugars that plants use for energy. For this reason, lignin is a major challenge for those who would extract those same plant sugars and use them to make advanced biofuels. As part of their search for economic ways to overcome the lignin challenge, researchers at the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) have characterized the enzymatic activity of a rain forest microbe that breaks down lignin essentially by breathing it.

"Using a combination of transcriptomics and proteomics we observed the anaerobe Enterobacter lignolyticus SCF1 as it grows on lignin," says Blake Simmons, a chemical engineer who heads JBEI's Deconstruction Division. "We detected significant lignin degradation over time by absorbance, suggesting that enzymes in E. lignolyticus could be used to deconstruct lignin and improve biofuels production. Our results also demonstrate the value of a multi-omics approach for providing insight into the natural processes of bacterial lignin decomposition."

Not only does lignin inhibit access to cellulose, the by-products of lignin degradation can also be toxic to microbes employed to ferment sugars into fuels. This makes finding microbes that can tolerate a lignin environment a priority for biofuels research. Tropical rainforests harbor anaerobic microbes that actually utilize lignin as their sole source of carbon. Kristen DeAngelis, a microbial ecologist formerly of JBEI and now with the University of Massachusetts, has led expeditions to the Luquillo Experimental Forest where she and her crew harvested soil microbes.

"Tropical soil microbes are responsible for the nearly complete decomposition of leaf plant litter in as little as eighteen months," she says. "The fast growth, high efficiency and specificity of enzymes employed in the anaerobic litter deconstruction carried out by these tropical soil bacteria make them useful templates for improving biofuel production."

In an earlier study at JBEI led by DeAngelis, E. lignolyticus SCF1 is a member, was shown to be capable of anaerobic lignin degradation, but the enzymes behind this degradation were unknown. Through their multi-omics approach plus measurements of enzyme activities, DeAngelis, Simmons and their colleagues were able to characterize the mechanisms by which E. lignolyticus SCF1 is able to degrade lignin during anaerobic growth conditions.

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DOE's Joint Bio Energy Institute and NERSC Advance Cellulosic Biofuel Production

Advanced biofuels – liquid fuels synthesized from the sugars in cellulosic biomass – offer a clean, green and renewable alternative to gasoline, diesel and jet fuels. Bringing the costs of producing these advanced biofuels down to competitive levels with petrofuels, however, is a major challenge. Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI), a bioenergy research center led by Berkeley Lab, have taken another step towards meeting this challenge with the development of a new technique for pre-treating cellulosic biomass with ionic liquids - salts that are liquids rather than crystals at room temperature. This new technique requires none of the expensive enzymes used in previous ionic liquid pretreatments, and makes it easier to recover fuel sugars and recycle the ionic liquid.

"Most of our ionic liquid efforts at JBEI have focused on using enzymes to liberate fermentable sugars from lignocellulosic biomass after pretreatment, but with this new enzyme-free approach we use an acid as the catalyst for hydrolyzing biomass polysaccharides into a solution containing fermentable sugars," says Blake Simmons, a chemical engineer who heads JBEI's Deconstruction Division and was the leader of this research. "We're then able to separate the pretreatment solution into two phases, a sugar-rich water phase for recovery and a lignin-rich ionic liquid phase for recycling. As an added bonus, our new pretreatment technique uses a lot less water than previous pretreatments."

Simmons is the corresponding author of a paper describing this research that has been published in the journal Biotechnology for Biofuels. The paper is titled "Production and extraction of sugars from switchgrass hydrolyzed in ionic liquids." Co-authoring it were Ning Sun, Hanbin Liu Noppadon Sathitsuksanoh, Vitalie Stavila, Manali Sawant, Anaise Bonito, Kim Tran, Anthe George, Kenneth Sale, Seema Singh and Bradley Holmes.

With the burning of fossil fuels continuing to add 9 billion metric tons of excess carbon dioxide to the atmosphere each year, the need for carbon neutral, cost-competitive renewable alternative fuels has never been greater. Advanced biofuels, produced from the microbial fermentation of sugars in lignocellulosic biomass, could displace gasoline, diesel and jet fuel on a gallon-for-gallon basis and be directly dropped into today's engines and infrastructures without impacting performance. If done correctly, the use of advanced biofuels would not add excess carbon to the atmosphere.

Environmentally benign ionic liquids are used as green chemistry substitutes for volatile organic solvents. While showing great potential as a biomass pretreatment for dissolving lignocellulose and helping to hydrolyze the resulting aqueous solution into fuel sugars, the best of these ionic liquids so far have required the use of expensive enzymes. Recent studies have shown that acid catalysts, such as hydrochloric or Brønsted, can effectively replace enzyme-based hydrolysis, but the subsequent separation of sugars and ionic liquids becomes a difficult and expensive problem can require the use of significant amounts of water.

Guided by molecular dynamics simulations carried out at DOE's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), Simmons and his colleagues at JBEI solved this problem by deploying the ionic liquid imidazolium chloride in tandem with an acid catalyst.

"Imidazolium is the most effective known ionic liquid for breaking down lignocellulose and the chloride anion is amenable with the acid catalyst," Simmons says. "The combination makes it easy to extract fermentable sugars that have been liberated from biomass and also easy to recover the ionic liquid for recycling. By eliminating the need for enzymes and decreasing the water consumption requirements of more traditional ionic liquid pretreatments we should be able to reduce the costs of sugar production from lignocellulose."

Complete separation of the pretreatment solution into sugar-rich water and lignin-rich ionic liquid phases was attained with the addition to the solution of sodium hydroxide. The optimized sodium hydroxide concentration for both phase separation and sugar extraction was 15-percent, resulting in the recovery of maximum yields of 54-percent glucose and 88-percent xylose. The JBEI researchers believe these sugar yields can be increased by optimizing the process conditions and using more advanced methods of phase separation and sugar recovery.

Codexis Goes Public, But At Lower End of Expectations

Less than six months after filing to go public, Codexis, one of several makers of microbes and catalysts used to generate green fuels and chemicals, debuted on the Nasdaq this morning under the symbol CDXS. But the news is bittersweet for the cleantech sector. Yes, the company made it to market — but it only fetched $78 million in what it expected to be a $100 million sale.

Based in Redwood City, Calif., Codexis sold 6 million shares to its existing investors for $13 each (instead of $15). Its most significant backer, Royal Dutch Shell, is holding on to its sizable stake. Today’s IPO is the culmination of a long journey for both the company and its investors, who had originally planned to take it public two years ago before the economic downturn set in.

While it may not have performed as hoped, Codexis still marks the first IPO of 2010 for the green sector, which could open the floodgates for more. And at least it beat biofuel competitor Amyris Biotechnologies, which just filed, to market. Both cylindrical solar module maker Solyndra and electric car darling Tesla Motors have filed to go public as well this year. Smart Grid networking company Silver Spring Networks has also retained underwriters for a prospective IPO.

CDXS closed at $13.26 after opening at $13.

Amryis is in Emeryville and has a LBL synthetic biologist as a founder, fwiw.

How the CleanTech guys do in their IPOs will be interesting: it's being touted as the next boom for the Bay. I have a nontrivial interest in Tesla going public. No, no, not because I have money in it. That's all I am going to say.

Enzyme Companies Have Cellulosic Fuel Breakthrough?

Many cellulosic fuel producers are working with enzymes to break down tough, inedible plant parts, such as corncobs or switch grass, into simpler sugars that can be fermented to ethanol. Now enzyme companies say they are near to breaking down another tough obstacle: the cost of enzymes that will make the next generation of low-carbon fuels.

The progress may help put cellulosic ethanol on course to compete commercially when the first large plants open next year.

Novozymes, the world's largest industrial enzyme producer, today launched a new line it says will yield ethanol from plant wastes at an enzyme price of about 50 cents a gallon. The latest product of a decade of research, this marks an 80 percent price drop from two years ago, according to Global Marketing Director Poul Ruben Andersen.

The advances, Andersen said, will help bring cellulosic ethanol production prices to under $2 a gallon by 2011, a cost on par with both corn-based ethanol and gasoline at current U.S. market prices.

Yesterday, Novozyme's competitor, California-based Genencor, a division of enzyme giant Danisco, announced its own new enzyme product, which falls within a similar price range of about 50 cents to make a gallon of fuel, according to Philippe Lavielle, executive vice president of business development.

"What we can see now is that it's feasible to do this today. Of course, that being said, you have to bear in mind that you have to build the large-scale factories to do this," Andersen said.

That capacity, though nearer than ever, has long been a future prospect. Next year, the nation's first commercial-sized plants are expected to open their doors. Among the climate benefits experts see are that the use of corn stover and other waste products rather than corn will cut the need for fertilizer, plowing and other greenhouse gas-producing steps currently used to make ethanol.

*crosses fingers*

Scratch Jatropha as a Biofuel

A comprehensive new analysis of water use in biofuel crop production finds that jatropha, an oil-rich plant championed for its ability to grow in arid regions where food crops cannot, is the biggest water hog of them all.

Researchers from the University of Twente, in the Netherlands, report in a recent issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that jatropha requires five times as much water per unit of energy as sugarcane and corn, and nearly ten times as much as sugar beet--the most water-efficient biofuel crop, according to the same study.

In recent years, as corn and other biofuel came under fire for driving up the cost of food production, some biofuel producers turned to Jatropha curcas, a weed that grows wild throughout the tropics and semitropics and produces seeds rich in oil.

In 2007, the oil-industry heavyweight BP teamed up with British biofuels company D1 Oils on a five-year, £80 million project to cultivate the plant in India, Southeast Asia, and Southern Africa. Together, the companies have planted more than 200,000 hectares so far. And the plant made headlines again late last year, when it became the first non-food-based biofuel to power a jet engine. But mounting evidence suggests that jatropha is not as ideal as once thought.

"The claim that jatropha doesn't compete for water and land with food crops is complete nonsense," says study coauthor Arjen Hoekstra. The researcher says it's true that the plant can grow with little water and can survive through periods of drought, but to flourish, it needs good growing conditions just like any other plant. "If there isn't sufficient water, you get a low amount of oil production," Hoekstra says.

Hoekstra and his colleagues assessed the water footprint of 13 different biofuel crops. Their calculations included regional estimates of how much rainwater each crop received and how much additional water would be required through irrigation for optimal growth. The study also considered evaporation rates during the growing season in the main production areas of each crop, and the average yields of each from 1997 to 2001. The figures were then averaged by country and globally to come up with a single water-footprint figure--per liter of ethanol or biodiesel--for each crop.

"You see a big difference depending on the country where the biomass is produced, different climates, different agricultural practices, the crop being used, whether it is a starch or sugar crop used for bioethanol, an oil crop for biodiesel, or a crop that is burned for electricity generation," Hoekstra says.

*cough*Need Cellulosic Biofuel techs*cough*

I HEART E-VIlle

The drying up of venture capital for alternative-fuel projects ought to have been a death knell for Emeryville, Calif., a square-mile sliver of land near Silicon Valley that until recently advertised itself as a "green corridor" for biofuel businesses. But, while the talk of a biofuel boom to rival the tech boom across the bay now sounds outlandish, this city of 6,800 people so far seems to be weathering the recession and the drop in oil prices that are hurting other parts of the green-tech sector.

Emeryville has a history as a rollicking industrial hub, with meatpacking, steelmaking, and paint companies sharing the streets with brothels and gambling houses. The 1970s marked a low point, but the town was cleaned up and revived by the ensuing technology boom. Today, a single, 24-hour gambling house remains: the Oaks Card Club, situated across the street from Pixar Animation Studios. "The town has completely changed," says John Tibbets, who owns Oaks.
A Foundation Already in Place

The city's push to be a hub for biofuels isn't as contrived as it might appear. Biotech and pharmaceutical firms, including giants such as Roche and Novartis NVS, have had facilities in Emeryville for years, and they rely on some of the same processes used to make biofuels. Geoffrey Sears, who heads a real estate firm called Wareham Development, leases offices to many biotech labs, and his clients now include two large biofuels ventures, Amyris Biotechnologies and the federally funded Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI). Sears says the economic downturn has not hurt rentals in Emeryville. The biofuels labs have held firm, and "more and more money is flowing" into existing biotech and pharmaceutical companies. "Our occupancy is 97%. We are planning some new buildings," which should be ready by 2011, he says.

Emeryville has been proactive in trying to reinvent itself and continually reinvent itself since the 1980s. Urban blight was the word that best described the implosion that E-Ville had during the 70s and 80s. From around 1988, the residents through the city government spent a lot of time turning the city around. Now its becoming one of the hotspots of the Bay, biotech wise and to live in. The problem is that it's not quite family friendly: its very, very good for young singles or couples or people with kids before school age, but the schools leave much to be desired as yet. I've loved living here since I moved to the Bay Area in 2001. However, with Avrora pending kindergarten...we're going to move. Alas.

However, profitable biofuels at $50/barrel. Discuss!

Where You Grow Biofuels Matters

A new study finds that it will take more than 75 years for the carbon emissions saved through the use of biofuels to compensate for the carbon lost when biofuel plantations are established on forestlands. If the original habitat was peatland, carbon balance would take more than 600 years. The study appears in Conservation Biology.

The oil palm, increasingly used as a source for biofuel, has replaced soybean as the world's most traded oilseed crop. Global production of palm oil has increased exponentially over the past 40 years. In 2006, 85 percent of the global palm-oil crop was produced in Indonesia and Malaysia, countries whose combined annual tropical forest loss is around 20,000 square kilometers.

Conversion of forest to oil palm also results in significant impoverishment of both plant and animal communities. Other tropical crops suitable for biofuel use, like soybean, sugar cane and jatropha, are all likely to have similar impacts on climate and biodiversity.

"Biofuels are a bad deal for forests, wildlife and the climate if they replace tropical rain forests," says research scientist Finn Danielsen, lead author of the study. "In fact, they hasten climate change by removing one of the world's most efficient carbon storage tools, intact tropical rain forests."

As countries strive to meet obligations to reduce carbon emissions under one international agreement (Kyoto Protocol), they may not only fail to meet their obligations under another (Convention on Biological Diversity) but may actually hasten global climate change.

According to the study, reducing deforestation is likely to represent a more effective climate-change mitigation strategy than converting forest for biofuel production, and it may help nations meet their international commitments to reduce biodiversity loss.

Alternatively, planting biofuels on degraded grasslands instead of tropical rain forests would lead to a net removal of carbon from the atmosphere in 10 years. Any biofuel plantations in tropical forest regions should be considered only in former forest land which has already been severely degraded to support only grassy vegetation.

"The EU and the US should only import and subsidize bio-fuel from guaranteed sustainable productions and only from countries which can demonstrate that their forests are sustainably managed," says Danielsen.

In some ways that feels like a "Well, duh, dude." I mean, you cut down the largest carbon sink around and...

Duck Weed to the Rescue!

Researchers at North Carolina State University have found that a tiny aquatic plant can be used to clean up animal waste at industrial hog farms and potentially be part of the answer for the global energy crisis. Their research shows that growing duckweed on hog wastewater can produce five to six times more starch per acre than corn, according to researcher Dr. Jay Cheng. This means that ethanol production using duckweed could be "faster and cheaper than from corn," says fellow researcher Dr. Anne-Marie Stomp.

"We can kill two birds – biofuel production and wastewater treatment – with one stone – duckweed," Cheng says. Starch from duckweed can be readily converted into ethanol using the same facilities currently used for corn, Cheng adds.

Corn is currently the primary crop used for ethanol production in the United States. However, its use has come under fire in recent years because of concerns about the amount of energy used to grow corn and commodity price disruptions resulting from competition for corn between ethanol manufacturers and the food and feed industries. Duckweed presents an attractive, non-food alternative that has the potential to produce significantly more ethanol feedstock per acre than corn; exploit existing corn-based ethanol production processes for faster scale-up; and turn pollutants into a fuel production system. The duckweed system consists of shallow ponds that can be built on land unsuitable for conventional crops, and is so efficient it generates water clean enough for re-use. The technology can utilize any nutrient-rich wastewater, from livestock production to municipal wastewater.

Large-scale hog farms manage their animal waste by storing it in large "lagoons" for biological treatment. Duckweed utilizes the nutrients in the wastewater for growth, thus capturing these nutrients and preventing their release into the environment. In other words, Cheng says, "Duckweed could be an environmentally friendly, economically viable feedstock for ethanol."

If it doesn't really require anything more than what corn does, this has huge potential. It isn't a food crop. It doesn't compete with the production of food crops. It wouldn't - if works as advertised - be possible to put into production using methods that do not require much development past scaling up, unlike the cellulosic ethanol.

Transgenic Plants Key to Ethanol Production

Plants, genetically modified to ease the breaking down of their woody material, could be the key to a cheaper and greener way of making ethanol, according to researchers who add that the approach could also help turn agricultural waste into food for livestock.

Lignin, a major component of woody plant material,, is woven in with cellulose and provides plants with the strength to withstand strong gusts of wind and microbial attack. However, this protective barrier or "plastic wall" also makes it harder to gain access to the cellulose.

"There is lots of energy-rich cellulose locked away in wood," said John Carlson, professor of molecular genetics, Penn State. "But separating this energy from the wood to make ethanol is a costly process requiring high amounts of heat and caustic chemicals. Moreover, fungal enzymes that attack lignin are not yet widely available, still in the development stage, and not very efficient in breaking up lignin."

Researchers have previously tried to get around the problem by genetically decreasing the lignin content in plants. However, this can lead to a variety of problems -- limp plants unable to stay upright, and plants more susceptible to pests.

"Trying to engineer trees without lignin is like trying to engineer boneless chicken," said Ming Tien, professor of biochemistry, Penn State. "It just doesn't make sense."

Carlson, Tien and postdoctoral associate Haiying Liang use a different genetic approach. Instead of decreasing the lignin content, they are trying to modify the connections in lignin, without compromising either the biosynthesis of lignin or the structural rigidity of the plant.

The Penn State geneticists and biochemists took a gene from beans and engineered it into a poplar tree. This gene produces a protein that inserts itself between two lignin molecules when the lignin polymer is created.

"Now we have a lignin polymer with a protein stuck in between," explained Carlson, who, along with Tien and Liang, has filed a provisional patent on the approach. "When that occurs, it creates a type of lignin that is not much different in terms of strength than normal lignin, but we can break open the lignin polymer by using enzymes that attack proteins rather than enzymes that attack lignin."

[...]

The genetic modification does not appear to weaken the plants, and the transformation may have turned them into more efficient sources of ethanol.

MMmm. Lignin strikes again!

Vote Miscanthus for Ethanol!

In the largest field trial of its kind in the United States, researchers have determined that the giant perennial grass Miscanthus x giganteus outperforms current biofuels sources – by a lot. Using Miscanthus as a feedstock for ethanol production in the U.S. could significantly reduce the acreage dedicated to biofuels while meeting government biofuels production goals, the researchers report.

The new findings, from researchers at the University of Illinois, appear this month in the journal Global Change Biology.

Using corn or switchgrass to produce enough ethanol to offset 20 percent of gasoline use – a current White House goal – would take 25 percent of current U.S. cropland out of food production, the researchers report. Getting the same amount of ethanol from Miscanthus would require only 9.3 percent of current agricultural acreage. (To view an audio slideshow about Miscanthus research, please go to: http://www.publicaffairs.illinois.edu/slideshows/Miscanthus_Yield/index.html.)

What we've found with Miscanthus is that the amount of biomass generated each year would allow us to produce about 2 1/2 times the amount of ethanol we can produce per acre of corn," said crop sciences professor Stephen P. Long, who led the study. Long is the deputy director of the BP-sponsored Energy Biosciences Institute, a multi-year, multi-institutional initiative aimed at finding low-carbon or carbon-neutral alternatives to petroleum-based fuels. Long is an affiliate of the U. of I.'s Institute for Genomic Biology. He also is the editor of Global Change Biology.

In trials across Illinois, switchgrass, a perennial grass which, like Miscanthus, requires fewer chemical and mechanical inputs than corn, produced only about as much ethanol feedstock per acre as corn, Long said.

"It wasn't that we didn't know how to grow switchgrass because the yields we obtained were actually equal to the best yields that had been obtained elsewhere with switchgrass," he said. Corn yields in Illinois are also among the best in the nation.

"One reason why Miscanthus yields more biomass than corn is that it produces green leaves about six weeks earlier in the growing season," Long said. Miscanthus also stays green until late October in Illinois, while corn leaves wither at the end of August, he said.

Here's a bit on Miscanthus giganteus. Where is it native to? Answer: Japan.