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Page added on December 11, 2006
Put A Termite In Your Tank
Bio breakthroughs are promising much better ways to make ethanol
Mark Emalfarb didn’t set out to cure America’s addiction to oil. He just wanted a better enzyme to soften blue jeans. The search led him to a new fungus in the wilds of eastern Russia, and then to a serendipitous mutation that turned the organism into a biofactory capable of churning out vast amounts of enzymes that can give denim a prized lived-in look. “By accident, we came by the world’s most prolific fungus,” he says.
That fungus and its talent for munching on plant fiber is now helping to bring about a radical transformation: a switch from oil and gasoline to fuels from plants. On Nov.2, Emalfarb’s company, Dyadic International Inc. in Jupiter, Fla., signed a deal with Spanish energy giant Abengoa to use the fungus to make fuel.
If efforts such as Abengoa’s can be scaled up efficiently, America’s forests, agricultural waste, and 40 to 60 million acres of prairie grass could supply 100 billion gallons or more of fuel per year—while slashing greenhouse gas emissions. That would replace more than half the 150 billion gallons of gasoline now used annually, greatly reducing oil imports.
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