Europe pursues biofuel creativity

Take elephant dung and wheat straw, and a century-old Dutch distiller thinks it could have the motor fuel of the future.

Royal Nedalco wants to make alcohol for fuel out of plant cellulose, the cheap and plentiful stuff that makes up crop residue, as well as wheat straw, wood and grasses. Nedalco officials say they’ve found a key to fermenting the sugar found in cellulose cheaply and effectively by using a yeast taken from elephant dung.
The European Union needs projects like this to work if it will meet a proposed mandate to fill 10% of its transportation energy needs with biofuels by 2020. Europe lags behind the United States and Brazil in ethanol, but production of biodiesel has soared, reflecting Europeans’ preference for fuel-efficient diesel cars.

Europeans want to reduce their use of fossil fuels, but they seem to worry less about energy security than Americans, due in part to the North Sea oil reserves. Their bigger concern is global warming, and biofuels could reduce carbon emissions.

Reaching the 2020 target will require increased domestic production of ethanol and biodiesel as well as more imports. But it will be up to individual countries like Holland to figure out how to meet the target, and policies differ from nation to nation.

USA Today