If you have been a reader of Blog4Brains for a while, you will no doubt know that the biofuel idea that we know today is one of America’s biggest blunders. Here are the former articles if you have not read them:

  - Why Flex-Fuel Is America’s Next Biggest Blunder — Part One

  - Why Flex-Fuel Is America’s Next Biggest Blunder — Part Two

  - Bush’s Ethanol Blunder Continues

So, you may be wondering why were are alluding to a future in biofuels. Well, the problem is we are currently using edible food to convert to fuel. Mainly, corn. This takes viable food for feeding people off of the global stage. This is placing fueling cars and machinery above fueling our fellow human beings. Sick, right? Well, there is an alternative, and it is using the cellulose, or inedible part of agriculture, to convert into ethanol. This would be the stalks of the plants, the inedible leaves and roots, and/or grasses.

This would be using what is normally agricultural waste, to fuel our future. A good idea, but there is a problem. This stuff is very difficult to convert into sugar, which is then converted to alcohol. The carbohydrate of the cellulose is locked up in a matrix of ligands or what some may call “fiber.” You have to breakdown the “fiber” to retrieve the “sugar.” The old method to extract this stuff was gasification. This normally takes quite a bit of energy, so you would have to use energy to produce energy. This creates a lower net output.

Instead of energy, scientists are looking into using enzymes and bacteria. This would replace the heat used to breakdown the cellulose, and increase the net energy output. A while back, we found a special kind of bacteria in the gut of termites that help the termite digest the wood fibers into energy. This gave us insight into how we could reproduce this effect, but on a larger scale.

All of this is fascinating, but unfortunately, it’s still a ways off. We need to be able to cheaply make these enzymes, and the best way to do that is to allow bacteria to do all the work for us. Easy, right? Well, it will be once we figure out how to recombine the genetics of these little buggers to reproduce themselves and evolve into millions of enzyme producing factories.

Scientists are working on this right now at CalTech. They are getting close to the actualization of this very idea, but they are still working on the genetic recombination. Let’s wish them luck.

Now, If you are interested in the science of all this, check out this video below from Technology Review. It goes into a lot more detail than this article.

Watch the video here.