Corn Stalks Engineered to Self-Degrade into Fuel
Most of you probably know that some percentage of the gasoline your vehicle consumes is a gasoline/ethanol mixture, in the United States ethanol is about 10% of that mixture.
Ethanol can be produced from any biological feedstock (corn, barley, wheat) that contains substantial amounts of sugar or materials that can be converted into sugar (starch, cellulose). In particular, corn contains starch that can relatively easily be converted into sugar. Many larger ethanol producers use a wet-milling process to make corn, which also yields products such as high-fructose corn sweetener.
One challenge with ethanol in order to bring the operational costs down is that the inedible parts of the corn (’biomass’) are wasted, not converted to fuel. Converting those leaves and stalk is a pretty expensive process.
Livescience is reporting on genetic engineers at Michigan State University that have genetically tailored corn plants to manufacture the appropritate enzymes in their own tissues and will help reduce costs in the conversion process from biomass to ethanol.
A patent has already been issued. Hopefully we can see our dependency on fossil fuels drop due to this sometime in the next decade.
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