(possibly) cool biofuels technology

[montyy0]

http://www.reuters.com/article/scienceNews/idUSTRE53K4UU20090421

of course, it has the usual "carbon neutral not carbon replacement" problem. Still, bio-gasoline sounds like a useful stepping stone.

Comments

[a_steep_hill]

The piece is too fluffy to really tell how close to useful reality their project is, but it does sound promising. Of course, all biofuel solutions will suffer from scaling and logistics problems because cellulose biomass just isn't that energy dense. For this reason, if I were running a startup to commercialize any of these technologies, one of my absolute design requirements would be that the unit be portable. (Portable, in this case, could mean requiring several days of setup and teardown; that would be OK.) That way, you take the refinery to the cellulose source, and just ship the final product. When that source is exhausted (done with harvest, or whatever) you move on to the next region