What do you think of Cellulosic ethanaol?

Question

Do you think it would be feasible to produce in the near future ? How does it compare to corn based ethanol ?

Does it have promise ?

Answer 1

Ethanol from whatever source is chemically identical.

Cellulosic ethanol is the Holy Grail of biofuels.  It's been a long time coming, because cellulose (actually, lignocellulose) is tough stuff and evolved to be hard for bugs to digest.  As of this date, there are no commercial-scale cellulosic ethanol plants in operation.

There are two major methods of producing liqid fuel from cellulose:  biological and catalytic.  The biological route may never work, because the enzyme digestion of cellulose yields mostly weak sugar solutions which in turn yield weak alcohol solutions which take a very large amount of energy to distill.  The catalytic route involves gasifying the biomass to a syngas containing CO and H2, which can be converted to ethanol (or other fuels) with catalysts.  One of Vinod Khosla's efforts has announced some progress in that direction recently.

Answer 2

Personally, I'm somewhat undecided about the mass production of agricultural crop-based biofuels in general. The land area required is significant, and don't we already have enough problems with irrigation/erosion and fertilizer/herb/pesticide pollution.  Cellulosic ethanol could theoretically alleviate some of these problems by opening up the source material to virtually all plants (dead branches/leaves included etc...) which could then be harvested without additional land dedicated to fuel production.

Answer 3

Hydrogen is the only way to go, if we are worried about global warming and sea rise what could be better than to desalinate sea water and use it as the source for hydrogen, and lower sea level or at least slow it down.

Answer 4

Any ethanol made from corn or sugar is going to be expensive because of the price of the raw materials.  

Wood is much cheaper than corn or sugar, so it's possible that someone could develop a process of making ethanol from wood that would be economically and environmentally viable.