Cellulosic Sugar, Not Cellulosic Ethanol

EcoGeek
Written by Yoni Levinson
Tuesday, 28 October 2008

Anyone who’s taken microeconomics remembers one of its first lessons: things are more efficient when people specialize their tasks. A recent article by Greentech Media points out that this idea could be utilized to give the biomass energy industry a little jolt. What specialization am I talking about? Sugar.

The two types of biomass energy that involve sugar chemistry are cellulosic ethanol and algae/bacteria derived fuel. The latter consume simple sugars and turn them into more useful chemicals; usually ethanol, but increasingly other compounds which might make even better fuels – such as butanol and kerosene (jet fuel).

The scientific challenge has always been to convert cellulose to sugar, but – according to the article – no one (other than academics) has been focusing on commercializing this step alone. Rather, the cellulosic ethanol plants incorporate the cellulose-to-sugar step as part of their overall process rather than focus on it exclusively. The people growing algae and bacteria, meanwhile, are more focused on genetically engineering their bugs to build sugar into exciting new molecules than they are on developing better ways to make that sugar.

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