New Fuel Source Grows on the Prairie

Scientists have projected that in the long run, ethanol made from biomass could be cheaper than gasoline or corn ethanol, costing as little as 60 cents a gallon to produce and selling for less than $2 a gallon at the pump. But right now it would be more expensive than gasoline, and the low prices are likely to be achieved only after large plants have been built and technical breakthroughs achieved in operating them.

Perhaps the biggest issue is this: Time and again, the country has grown interested in alternative fuels only to drop the subject as soon as oil prices fell. Will the United States be able to make a plan and stick with it for the long haul?

Big Oil Needs Ethanol

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The oil and coal and natural gas that people use today was itself plant residue, millions of years ago. That residue got buried before it could fully decompose, and heat and pressure within the Earth cooked it into its present form: fossil fuels rich in carbon compounds. In essence, modern society is trying to develop a technology that skips the burial step, converting biomass directly to fuel. "We want to speed it up a bit," Dale said.

The benefits could be substantial. Burning fossil fuels releases buried carbon back into the air in the form of carbon dioxide, and since the industrial revolution the concentration of that gas in the atmosphere has jumped to levels unseen on the planet in more than 600,000 years. The elementary laws of physics -- carbon dioxide is a "greenhouse gas" that traps heat -- suggest that it will warm the Earth, though how fast is uncertain.

In contrast, a system that converted biomass directly to transport fuel would be potentially neutral as far as greenhouse gases. Plants would suck carbon dioxide out of the air in, say, May, and cars burning the resulting fuel in October would re-emit the same carbon dioxide.

In addition, many people believe that such a system would improve the nation's security, given that two-thirds of the world's oil reserves are in the unstable Persian Gulf region.

Two former directors of central intelligence, R. James Woolsey and John M. Deutch, have become advocates of biomass as a fuel source. The basic insight, Woolsey said in an interview, is to realize that global warming, the geopolitics of oil, and warfare in the Persian Gulf are not separate problems -- they are aspects of a single problem, the West's dependence on oil. Woolsey throws fundamentalist Muslim terrorism into the mix, noting that funds for the schools that turn out Islamic radicals come from Persian Gulf states enriched by oil money.

"This is the only war the U.S. has ever fought where we pay for both sides," Woolsey said.

Scientists have long known that the carbohydrates in plants could be converted to the hydrocarbons in fuel and other valuable chemicals. But inefficient conversion techniques couldn't compete, on price, with an industry that obtained its valuable chemicals by poking holes in the ground.

Since the oil crises of the 1970s, companies and farm cooperatives have been making ethanol from corn kernels. They fought a tooth-and-nail battle with the petroleum industry, which funded much research attempting to discredit ethanol, but lately a truce has been declared. The oil companies need ethanol to stretch tight gasoline supplies and to replace a gasoline additive that causes environmental problems, and the corn ethanol business, buoyed by federal subsidies and mandates, is booming.

The basis of that industry is a simple sugar called glucose that corn plants pack into long, loosely knit molecules called starch. Turning the starch into sugar and then fermenting it into alcohol is easy, but there's a limit on how much ethanol can be produced from the nation's corn harvest without hurting the food supply.

For 30 years, some scientists have believed the ultimate feedstock for transportation fuel would be something called cellulose--for the elementary reason that it is the most abundant organic molecule on the planet.