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ROB SOUTH: Researchers at Michigan State University are working on making bio-fuels like ethanol
more available to consumers.
Their hope is to replace petroleum based fuels with more environmentally friendly fuels made
from renewable sources.
BRUCE DALE: Well, we do have about fourteen billion gallons or so of ethanol from corn,
but it probably can't grow much more after that--that's roughly 10% by volume of our
total gasoline--but we just don't have enough corn to replace half or two-thirds or 100%
of our gasoline pool.
To do that, we'd have to rely on plant material that's not food.
So we're talking about grasses, wood chips, straw, saw dust, parts of municipal waste--converting
that into liquid fuels.
SOUTH: But turning non-food crops into a fuel that can run your car is more complicated
and more expensive.
Ethanol is made by fermenting sugars.
But the sugars in trees and grasses are much harder to get to.
DALE: We have to subject the plant material to conditions that it doesn't experience in
nature.
What we use is hot, concentrated ammonia.
Think really hot, really concentrated Windex, is what we use.
That breaks open enough of the plant cell structure so that the enzymes, these are biological
molecules that attack those sugars and make fermentable sugar out of them.
SOUTH: MSU has been given a three-million dollar federal grant to make the process commercially
viable.
The plan is to take some of the risk out of starting a bio-fuels operation and give investors
more confidence in renewable energy production.
DALE: I'm sure that our processes today are better than four bucks a gallon, but there
are a whole lot of impediments in the way to be taking something from the laboratory
and getting it to your corner gas station.
Our fuel market, for example, is not open--you can't just put a new fuel on the market. The
people that control the infrastructure, the requirements of the engines and so forth say,
such and such fuels and not others.
So that's something we have to work on. We have to be able to have more flex-fuel vehicles,
vehicles that can accept a wider range of fuels.
We have to have the fueling and infrastructure that allows that kind of fuel to be delivered
to the customer.
For WKAR Public Media, I'm Rob South with reWorking Michigan.