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Published online 25 February 2009 | Nature 457, 1070 (2009) | doi:10.1038/4571070b
News in Brief
Commercial biofuels plant planned for Florida
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Like Australia, the USA is replete with marginal land and abundant sun. We should not be converting corn to ethanol, but developing agriculture of plants storing solar energy not as cellulose but hydrocarbons, as evergreens and many succulents do. Downstream processing of such biomass to replace fossil sources of complex hydrocarbons will be difficult; but such challenges are the mother of invention. There is ultimately much more energy to be obtained from bio-hydrocarbons than from cellulose (a carbohydrate), by a factor of more than 2, just as the biological combution of fat produces more ATP than burning glucose. There is no question that there is an abundance of marginal land and sun; it is just how to use these resources to augment fuels and to provide raw carbon resources for new synthetic chemistries.
Many of the so-called marginal lands are actually diverse grassland habitats. Converting these to monocultures of feedstock crops for bioenergy will result in a tremendous loss of biodiversity and will potentially exacerbate soil C and nutrient losses. It is better for bioenergy producers to consider the use of diverse feedstocks rather than single species. Gasification technology can be brought to bear on these feedstocks, which can be as diverse as species from mixed-grass prairies to household garbage. These would be more sustainable over the long-term than single-species sources.