Fueling Cars with Plants?

Plants have been suggested as a renewable fuel source, but so far methods to extract their stored energy have generally not been efficient enough to make them competitive with fossil fuels. Vegetable oils make up only a small portion of plants' mass and the energy output of ethanol is only around 10% greater than the energy input required to make it.

New research has developed a method to use carbohydrates, which can make up around 75% of plants' dry weight, to produce a fuel much like conventional diesel. While the process used to make the fuel is very efficient, efficient extraction of the carbohydrate from plant matter has not yet been developed.

Links:

• Green diesel: New process makes liquid transportation fuel from plants from the College of Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison


• Plant carbs harnessed to power cars from nature.com (subscription)

Posted by Eric La Fountaine at 3:27 PM on January 18, 2006

Want to talk about this weblog entry? As of August 22, 2006, all new entries and most older entries are cross-posted to the UBC Botanical Garden Discussion Forums for discussion (you might need to use the search function to find the thread you are looking for).

This is an effort to reduce the amount of time spent dealing with spam (the forums are very good at stopping spam, the weblog commenting system is not so good).

Older entries already containing comments remain open for discussion.