So it turns out the reason that everyone was getting all angry about ethanol last year was the wrong reason. The alternative bio-fuel, which is mostly made from corn, was widely blamed last year for skyrocketing food costs. But, this year, a Congressional Budget Office report has concluded that only a small percentage of the increase in food prices was due to ethanol.

But that doesn't mean we should all jump back on the ethanol bandwagon. According to a new University of Minnesota study, producing ethanol from corn requires about three times more water than previously thought. The study says that ethanol production required about 861 billion gallons of water. This is water that, in recent years, has been in significant decline in America's food-growing states. 

A gallon of ethanol, depending on irrigation practices, might require up to 2,100 gallons of water to produce. While, in areas more suited to corn production, it can take as little as 100 gallons of water to produce a gallon of ethanol. The worst news of all of this, is that from 2005 to 2008 water use for ethanol production increased 246%, whereas U.S. bioethanol production has increased only 133%. This means that corn ethanol production has pushed into land that is not well-suited for growing corn, thus increasing water use far more than it increased yield.

So while you can stop worrying that you're burning the poor's food in your gas tank, you should be worried that you're burning your children's water. Let's hope that cellulosic ethanol can take over for the limitations of corn.

When electricity flows at  a trickle pace, it’s not very useful for a lot of our high-power applications. That’s why, as we all know, finding a way to store that energy so that it can build up slowly over time is critically important.

One way to store that trickle is to run a chemical reaction that will leave us with some combustible fuel.  For example, scientists are working on catalysts that will make it easier to split water into O2 and H2 – the latter being combustible hydrogen - using electricity derived from photovoltaic power.

In the same vein, scientists recently developed a process called electromethanogensis.  If you break down the name, you see that the process involves generating methane (natural gas) from electricity.  How does this happen?  The answer lies in a species of bacteria known as Methanobacterium palustre (see the word “methane” in there?), which is able to chemically reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) into methane (CH4).

The bacteria is used as part of an electrolytic cell.  An electrolytic cell is the opposite of a battery – a battery takes two compounds that want to react with each other and taps that potential in the form of electricity.  In an electrolytic cell, the electrons are pumped in and they drive the reaction uphill, so to speak.  In this case that uphill reaction is CO2 turning into CH4 (the opposite of the downhill version, which happens when we burn CH4, or any other fossil fuel).  The bacteria’s job is to catalyze the process, which means that you get a lot more natural gas for the same amount of electricity fed in.

What’s interesting is that the scientist primarily involved, Dr. Bruce Logan of Penn State University, has also used bacteria for the opposite process – microbial fuel cells (in fact he wrote a book on the subject).  In that process, bacteria are harnessed to eat nasty molecules from sources such as municipal waste pools, break them down and release electric energy as a byproduct. 

This is the kind of thing that makes biological-based energy sources so intriguing.  In reality, bio-energy makes up a tiny fraction of all renewable energy out there, and some suggest that it will always be that way.  But in principle, bio-energy holds so much potential that it’s hard to say where the technology will be in 10 years from now.  We’ve been tweaking microbes to make drugs and natural products for a while, but we’ve only begun thinking about incorporating them into the energy infrastructure, be it in methane synthesis such as this, bio-diesel production or algae fuel.

Via Green Car Congress
Image via Penn State