Switchgrass to Gas?

A biotech startup says its genetic engineering method could turn plants into cheap ethanol producers within five years. Raab is president and founder of Agrivida, a Cambridge, MA-based biotech startup that wants to add genes to plants to make it cheaper and easier to process them into ethanol. He hopes the technology his company is developing will make ethanol derived from plants, including switchgrass, a viable alternative to gasoline. Using the whole plant would produce much more ethanol — but the sugars in the stalks and leaves are in the form of cellulose, which is a much more complex chain of sugar molecules. He predicts the process will be about 50 percent cheaper than current processes once it matures. And it could be adapted to switchgrass, he says. The study projects that using cellulose from switchgrass would triple that net gain, to about 60,000 BTUs per gallon, mostly because little fossil fuel would be used in farming the grass.

technologyreview