Switch Grass News Done Right

Wired Magazine does Switchgrass this month. They explain the whole potential and pitfall of cellulosic ethanol in three paragraphs shown below:

On a blackboard, it looks so simple: Take a plant and extract the cellulose. Add some enzymes and convert the cellulose molecules into sugars. Ferment the sugar into alcohol. Then distill the alcohol into fuel. One, two, three, four — and we're powering our cars with lawn cuttings, wood chips, and prairie grasses instead of Middle East oil.

Unfortunately, passing chemistry class doesn't mean acing economics. Scientists have long known how to turn trees into ethanol, but doing it profitably is another matter. We can run our cars on lawn cuttings today; we just can't do it at a price people are willing to pay.

The problem is cellulose. Found in plant cell walls, it's the most abundant naturally occurring organic molecule on the planet, a potentially limitless source of energy. But it's a tough molecule to break down.

As always with Wired. Its worth the read. As far as a primer on cellulosic ethanol goes you'll be hard pressed to find a source that does it as well.

Behold! The Concept of Cellulosic Tofu

I had a conversation a week ago that popped into memory today.

ICM is a company doing some pretty interesting reasearch around cellulosic and next generation ethanol processes. As their website says, they are "dedicated to sustaining agriculture on innovation."

To this end one of their business development guys, Alan Goodnight, mentioned something profound in passing (I don't know Alan he just gave me his card after the conversation). ICM's research on cellulosic ethanol is focusing on extracting protein as well as ethanol from biomass crops like switchgrass.

He mentioned that agriculture world wide is carbohydrate rich and protein poor. Finding an inexpensive and plentiful protein source is as valuable, if not more valuable, than cellulosic ethanol.

Just a unique mention I hadn't heard before. Something to look for as other emerging cellulosic ethanol companies make their commercial scale push to exist in the post $80 crude barrel world we might be entering.

Glomalin: What likely makes switchgrass so special

The USDA has a great easy to read article which covers the basics of glomalin as it relates to plants. According to the USDA article it turns out that switchgrass has higher glomalin activity which might explain its robust growth and better carbon gobbling ablity over other crops like corn.

I don't know the science at all beyond a basic level but even for a layperson like myself I can see the potential. If we could better understand glomalin's function or influencing factors we might be able to boost the carbon feasting ablities of other crops.

Glomalin is a sugar protein excreted by soil fungi ands serves an additional role as a facilitator of water and nutrient uptake into the roots of plants. I have seen presentations where they talk about plants, fungi, and symbiotic relationships before but this is the first study I've seen where they might influence the amount of biomass to be had by a plant.

Said best by Linda Tokarz who wrote the article at the USDA:

"Glomalin may be partly responsible for the ability of switchgrass to store more soil carbon than corn—and to store it deeper, so it’s less likely to be lost to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. Thus, glomalin might not only help biofuel crops grow and flourish under adverse conditions like drought, but also close the carbon cycle by storing carbon released as carbon dioxide during the burning of biofuels for energy."


The picture above is a microscopic view of glomalin taken from the USDA article page. This picture and further reading are better explained at the USDA page.