Ethanol vs. electricity

Suppose you take an acre’s worth of switchgrass and turn it into ethanol for your flex-fuel car, while your neighbors take their acre’s worth and burn it in a power plant to generate electricity for their plug-in hybrid. Which car would go farther?

If you guessed that your car would, you’d be way off. About 7,000 miles off, in fact.

In a study published online today by the journal Science, researchers say using biomass to generate electricity is more efficient for transportation than making biofuels – and might actually do more to cut CO2 emissions as well.

So does that mean bioelectricity is better than bioethanol? Wrong again.

“Currently, at a commercial scale, we’re only beginning to explore these two different scenarios,” said lead study author Elliott Campbell, an engineering professor at the University of California at Merced. “In both cases, it really remains to be seen which technology pathway can develop quicker.”

MSNBC