Grassoline-how grass replaces gas

 

Living in the middle east gives you a really warped perspective about oil. In most countries where oil is cheaper than water, people don’t really care about what happens to oil reserves because they know that they will last a long time. What happens when these sources of black gold dry up? The world will grind to a halt as fossil fuels are the major source of fuel in our world today. Nuclear power is not safe enough, Hydro and solar electricity  can’t be used everywhere. So what then? Scientists I believe have a new miracle source for fuel in the form of Panicum virgatum.  In North America, this so called savior of the fuel world is also called Switchgrass.

You heard me right.

Grass.

Apparently this fast growing, perennial grass can solve our energy problem. It is the chief raw material used to produce a distilled fuel called cellulosic ethanol. Cellulose is a the stuff that plant cells are made of, and the more cellulose a plant can yield the better bio-fuel it becomes. And that is where switchgrass comes in. compared to gasoline, it takes energy to create cellulosic ethanol from switchgrass than to get gasoline form crude oil. Where crude oil has energy ratio of 1: 0.81, switchgrass yields ten times the energy put into it, found researcher Michael Wang of the Argonne National Laboratory.

The process involves breaking  down cellulose into its basic components, adding yeast and waiting for it to ferment into alcohol. After it’s refined, the ethanol produced can be used as fuel. Even better,  lignin – a byproduct created when water is eliminated from cellulose has shown promise for use as a fuel to power ethanol production plants. If lignin can be harnessed, this could make ethanol processing self-sustaining. Also, since Switchgrass is a hardy plant that can survive droughts, is a self-seeding crop which means it can spread on its own. It requires low levels of fertilizers and grows to maturation in three years.

It sounds great, but as all good things do, this too has a slight glitch.  Since the cellulose is broken down using enzymes, the enzymes used to produce ethanol, add to the overall expense. According to researchers in the US, it could come up to 20cents worth of enzymes per gallon. With the increasing population in the world today, one has to wonder about where all this grass is going to be cultivated. What cultivable land switchgrass gets is left over from the main areas of cultivation. In countries like India, and China, where there isn’t enough space for people to live, where oh where are we going to grow grass?

This plan however is feasible in countries of the middle east where vast areas are un inhabited. If they could find a way of establishing this plant in the large deserts of the region, then we can solve both energy and environmental problems. Desert lands could be reclaimed to cultivate the grass and we’d have an alternate source of energy.

The idea is feasible though all the hitches in the development plan for this useful   grass have to be straightened.