Environmentalism + Biotechnology = Strange Bedfellows

treethanol-copy.gifAccording to most recent accounts in the press, ethanol is going through a PR crisis. These days the alternative fuel is hardly seen as the clean solution to our fuel problems, as originally touted. It’s apparently not as environmentally friendly as initial reports indicated, and it’s grossly inefficient. The energy-intensive methods needed to extract ethanol from targeted crops such as corn, sugar, soybean and switchgrass produce greenhouse gas emissions at only slightly lower rates than the direct consumption of traditional fossil fuels; in addition, the allocation of agricultural resources to the production of ethanol-suitable crops has raised a plethora of concerns, ranging from potential food shortage to inefficient land use to excessive fertilizer run-off.

Biotech could change that. According to an article published in a recent issue of the New York Times science supplement, genetic engineers at various public and private institutions are racing to create strains of ethanol-friendly trees. “Treethanol” is seen by many as a significantly more efficient — and controversial — version of ethanol. Given their relatively high amounts of cellulose — the key component for ethanol production — trees seem like a natural resource toward this end. But the lignins that give wood its structure and composition prevent scientists from efficiently tapping this high cellulosity. The obvious solution, according to industry scientists, is to bioengineer trees with lower amounts of lignins. While the genetic pathways by which this could be accomplished are well understood and easily modified, the criticism aimed at these efforts is no less acute than that leveled at other forms of ethanol; the range of concerns includes familiar issues such as the vast amounts of land that will need to be allocated to grow transgenic trees, as well as newer issues such as the admixture of modifed genes with those from wild strains in natural populations and the possibility of creating entire forests of structurally unstable trees. While these concerns are very real, as cases of gene mixing between bioengineered and natural crops abound, research is currently thriving; the Energy Department recently granted $1.4 million over three years to a team of Purdue researchers experimenting with lignin reduction.

The Economist published a similar article back in March. Click here to read.


Posted on Friday, December 21st, 2007 at 3:16 pm | Tagged in Biofuel, Energy Efficiency, Global Warming | posted by Bill

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