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New Fuel on the Prairie

It sounds a bit like the end of Back To the Future, when Doc Brown pops open the gas cap of his Dolorian to reveal that it’s now being run on … garbage. Flash forward to the real 21st century, when farmers, politicians and scientists are developing a new fuel made from plant waste, wood chips and waste paper.

It’s called “biomass,” and whether it’s the wave of the future will be largely determined by three things: Whether it can be mass-produced at an affordable price; whether plant materials such as corn stalks and leaves can be stored for use in the winter months; and whether Americans jump back on the foreign fuel bandwagon if oil prices come back down.

Right now, with oil as much as $50 per barrel, and concerns over global warming mounting, the pressure to reduce our country’s dependence on foreign oil is at a fever pitch. That makes alternative fuels such as ethanol and biomass all the more appealing. While still expensive to produce, the price now seems competitive with gasoline and efforts are underway to produce them more efficiently and bring the price down.

Fuels made from plant material burn cleaner than those made from oil, releasing fewer greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, which in turn could help to slow global warming.

Until recently, efforts to produce alternative fuels focused chiefly on ethanol, which in the United States is made from corn. But ethanol provides just 3 percent of the nation’s gasoline. Because corn is such a major food staple, it’s unlikely we could ever produce enough to supply more than 10 to 12 percent of the country’s fuel needs.

Biomass, on the other hand, can be made from plant waste that isn’t needed for food and is often burned as a means of disposal. It can also be made from wood chips, waste paper, sawdust and other materials that are plentiful.

Using biomass instead of oil could even make the country more secure, some say, because so much of the world’s oil supply comes from unstable countries in the Persian Gulf. It may well be a fuel source whose time has come.

To read more about this story, read the article in the Washington Post.

To read more about this and other environmental health issues, go to: www.environmentalhealthnews.org, www.ourstolenfuture.org, or www.healthandenvironment.org