Biofuel push draws inventors and investors

Near a cluster of purple petunias in a Thousand Oaks greenhouse sprouts a key weapon in the nation’s ambitious push into biofuels.

The plants don’t look like much. They’re just tall, spiky shoots of prairie grass. But these stalks are souped-up samples of switch grass, part of an urgent drive toward a new kind of ethanol using plant fibers instead of corn kernels or sugar cane.

Ceres Inc., the biotechnology company nurturing this batch of switch grass, is betting that the plant has a big future as an energy crop. It’s a strong candidate because it can be grown year-round in poor soil, then harvested and converted to fuel ethanol without displacing traditional food crops.

Researchers at Ceres and labs around the world are experimenting with various crops and forms of plant waste and conjuring up enzyme cocktails that would lower the cost of teasing energy out of the cell walls of plants.

LA Times