Competing Technologies Push to Commercialize Renewable Petroleum

The New York Times
By JESSICA LEBER of ClimateWire
Published: July 2, 2009

Here's the Earth's recipe for petroleum: Take plants. Add pressure and heat. Bake for hundreds of millions of years.

Today, companies are racing to cook the same products, but they want to do it in hours or days.

Converting crops, plant residue and even trash to fuels avoids unleashing the fossil carbon buried millennia ago. More importantly, experts say, "biogasoline," renewable diesel and clean jet fuel would not face the major infrastructure barriers that have limited the expansion of ethanol use, or, for that matter, electric cars.

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