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Ethanol grants come through

Blueprints for cellulose plants get US funding.

The next generation of biofuel facilities will break ground this year. On 28 February the US Department of Energy (DOE) announced that it would provide up to $385 million to help underwrite six biorefineries that will extract fuel from materials such as wheat straw, wood chips, grass clippings and even orange peels.

Read the story here.

Posted by Nicola Jones on March 2, 2007 06:22 PM |

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I didn't see any numbers on the expected energy return on these various bio-fuel methods... ie, how many BTUs of product fuel energy per BTU of total process input energy. That has always seemed to be the major shortfall of corn-to-ethanol. It uses as much or more energy to produce the ethanol fuel as the fuel is worth when it is used.

Posted by: William Statler | March 5, 2007 04:59 PM

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