Sugar Cane Waste into Useful Energy etc.

Cetrel, the largest provider of environmental solutions for the manufacturing industry in Latin America, and Novozymes, the world’s leading producer of industrial enzymes, today announced a research partnership to turn sugarcane waste into green energy.

Using Cetrel’s know-how in waste-stream treatment and Novozymes’ biotech expertise, the partners aim to enable sugar and ethanol production plants in Brazil to turn bagasse, the waste from sugarcane production, into biogas using enzymes. The biogas can be used to produce electricity for production facilities, and surplus electricity can be sold to the market through the electric grid. _Checkbiotech.org

Turning waste cellulose into useful energy changes the economics of human energy use considerably. Growing biomass on marginal soils independent of food crops will change the economics even more. Learning to produce fuels from waste, biomass, and low quality carbon sources using custom designed microbes will turn current energy thinking on its head.

In Washington, the United States Energy Information Administration released Annual Energy Outlook 2010 with projections now extended through through 2035.

Among its findings, a “Declining Reliance on Imported Liquid Fuels: Total U.S. consumption of liquid fuels, including both fossil liquids and biofuels, grows from 19 million barrels per day in 2008 to 22 million barrels per day in 2035. Biofuels account for all of the growth, as consumption of petroleum-based liquids is essentially flat. As a result, reliance on imported oil declines significantly over the next 25 years.” _Biofuelsdigest

Current analysts and pundits appear to have absolutely no idea of the capacity of bioenergy to change things.