ORN#5 Cellulosic Ethanol

Hi friends,

Before I get to the newest video, I want to say thanks for the ratings and reviews on ITunes! If you haven’t yet, please check us out on ITunes and leave a rating and/or review, which helps us get notice in a very large ITunes world. Just do a search for Our Renewable Nation in the ITunes store.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nHLctl761k



Our latest video, ORN# 5 Cellulsoic Ethanol, is Carrick’s tour of Verenium’s demonstration plant in Jennings, Louisiana. Verenium has been developing a process of using high-energy crops and native plants to make cellulosic ethanol to fuel cars and trucks.

Ethanol has been a controversial alternative fuel to gasoline, with a lot of headlines and politics involved for the last several years. Much of the gasoline now sold in the U.S. has a blend of 10% ethanol, which is being made from corn. Making ethanol from corn really gets into a whole host of issues, like growing food crops for fuel. Corn is an energy-intensive crop to grow and farmers end up using a lot more energy to grow and harvest the corn than we get from using the ethanol in our cars. Then there’s the problem of rising food prices because the corn is being used for fuel instead of food, and corn is in A LOT of food we buy (watch the movie King Corn or read the book ‘The Omnivore’s Dilemma’ by Michael Pollan for more on that). Plus, even planting every acre of land available in the U.S. with corn to make ethanol wouldn’t get us anywhere near what we use for transportation fuel in this country.

Cellulosic ethanol can be made from native plants and grasses that need very little help to grow abundantly, and from crops that are able to produce many times more ethanol per acre than corn. One of the big challenges with producing cellulosic ethanol is breaking down the cell walls to get at the sugars trapped in these plants materials. Verenium has developed a process of conditioning and pressurizing the plant materials then adding enzymes to break down the cell walls, making it possible to yield a much greater amount of ethanol from plants than the process of producing corn ethanol.

On our cross-country journey we were given a rare opportunity to visit and tour Verenium’s cellulosic ethanol demonstration plant in Louisiana. This is not a place that is open to the public. In fact, no kid has ever walked through the facility before Carrick. There is a lot of money invested in developing this process and a handful of other companies are in the race to perfect the secrets to making cellulosic ethanol. Naturally, they are selective about how many people they bring through, so we were very lucky!

You may notice this is a short video, shorter than normal. During our tour of Verenium I couldn’t imagine how we were going to take a subject as complex as cellulosic ethanol and make a 5-minute video for a broad audience including kids. There was so much to show and tell, and so many issues involved that in the end I decided to keep it short and not overload it with information. There is a lot of discussion and debate about ethanol on the internet, so our video serves as a “taste of” and anyone interested can do more poking around on their own.

We use SO MUCH gasoline in this country for transportation that it’s hard to imagine any one source of fuel that we can produce to take its place. That’s not to say it can’t be done, it’s just to highlight the tremendous challenge any alternative fuel faces. Making vehicles more fuel-efficient is one way to help meet that challenge. Also, the idea of a Chevy Volt-style hybrid with a fuel-driven range extender would dramatically lower our use of fuel by letting us drive on electricity most of the time and only use fuel when driving farther than 50 miles.

Before I close this out I want to mention the upcoming sustainability fair in Hull, Massachusetts by our friends at Sustainable South Shore, who helped sponsor our project. We went last year and it was great – here’s more info:
7th Annual Earth Day Sustainable Living Expo
Sat., April 17, 2010 at the DCR Mary Jeanette Murray
Bathhouse, 204 Nantasket Ave., Hull, MA 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.
FREE. See website: www.sustainablesouthshore.org
for details about last year's Festival vendors and organizations
plus updated information for the 2010 Sustainable Living Expo.
40 Table spaces, inside and outside, of sustainable living related
companies and organizations. Sponsored by Sustainable South
Shore Inc. (18 So. Shore Towns), a Chapter of MCAN,
www.massclimateaction.net.
Info.: 781-925-9066 nancy@sustainablesouthshore.org
Hull Wind 1 Turbine tours from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.