Earlier this year, I got word of a new company that has the first plans to build a cellulosic ethanol plant in Georgia in 2008. Range Fuels plans to use waste products from corn production (and hopefully, waste products from other proliferative agricultural processes too) to make ethanol. More and more companies are seeing this time of environmental need as an opportunity to be innovative, and the news media is all over those kinds of stories, too.
Just today, I ran across an NPR Story from a March '07 Talk of the Nation (Science Friday) show about the viability of biofuels in which a Range Fuels CEO serves on a panel that addresses this particular method of weaning the US off its "fossil fuel addiction," including US enthusiasm over Brazilian ethanol. From my perspective, the reason this story is so great is that they go into the issue not only from a ChemE perspective but from a sustainability point of view.
One particularly keen question that came up is, how can we support corn-based fuels when they are one of the largest users of petroleum-based fertilizer in this country? That's one more very large reason for spreading the use of composting!
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