Grassoline

I read about this subject in Scientific American while I was waiting in the doctor's office, the only place I have ever found this brainy magazine. It is very interesting to read and I used to contemplate a subscription but it is SO cerebral that I fear it will surely cause headaches or permanent damage to my head.

Anyway, the story was about the so-called second generation of biofuels ___ those that use non-food crops like switchgrass, ag waste (corn stalks, etc.), chipped logging slash, and so forth. Without getting into the details (which is just as well as I'm not sure I could) the idea is to produce cellulosic ethanol.

The article explained that cellulose is much harder to break down into sugars (or separate from the sugars, I'm not sure) than corn or sugar cane. Apparently the same molecular structure that provides strength for a blade of grass to grow upright also makes it hard to work with.

See how well I did in chemistry? Guess I'd better stick with the broader implications . . . the upshot is that cellulosic ethanol takes more work and energy to produce. And will thus cost more. And thus will not be on the table soon, at least until the technology is discovered to reduce its cost and make it competitive with the "easy" ethanol. This is like the oil produced from deep wells or oil sands in Canada versus the cheaper Arabian imported stuff.

It seems hard to sell the public on the idea of spending more on gas to help the environment. Gas is already expensive and while ethanol reduces the carbon output it does not eliminate it like a plug-in electric car might (but only if the generating plants were nuclear or solar or wind-powered).

In a depression is this the time to invest in the environment? Or, as a reader in another magazine wrote about a story on Canada's (hugely destructive) mining of oil sands: "I work in one of those mines and it lets me feed my family. Which is more important?"