My kind of ethanol

Corn: Not my kind of ethanol

I am regularly criticizing corn-based ethanol, but I hate always being negative. Nonetheless, it is just disappointing that biofuels are so dominated by pork-driven corn subsidies, when investment should ONLY be going into cellulosic biofuels and hot biofuel technologies such as cyanobacteria.

Cyanobacteria offer unmatched biofuel yield relative to other potential sources of bioenergy, including arable crops and forestry-based candidates, according to the project leaders. The ASU/BP/SFAz partnership will seek to boost the fatty acid metabolism of Synechocystis to generate more lipids while minimizing competing metabolic pathways. (more)

Is Cyanobacteria the key to biofuels?

Cyanobacterium + CO2 + Sunlight = Clean and Green Energy

Forget corn, forget sugar - forget all plants. Is ethanol all about pond scum? Could replacing oil with ethanol be as simple as cyanobacterium, CO2 and sunlight?

That was the point of a display by Professor Pengchen Fu, of the University of Hawaii, at Wired's Nextfest this past weekend.

"The benefit over other techniques of producing ethanol is that this is simple and quick—taking days rather than the months required to grow crops that can be converted to ethanol," Fu told the Honolulu Advertiser back in May.

"And he believes it can be done for significantly less than the cost of gasoline and also less than the cost of ethanol produced through conventional methods.

Also, this system is not a net producer of carbon dioxide: Carbon dioxide released into the environment when ethanol is burned has been withdrawn from the environment during ethanol production."

Now that's green - pun intended.