Should We Replace Oil With Switchgrass?

April 03, 2008

I don’t know about you, but I feel pretty bummed every time I pull my aging, bumper-sticker laden Saturn sedan up to a gas station pump, and not just because I know that filling the tank is going to eat another chunk out of my bank balance. Since I work out of my home, I don’t drive as much as I used to, but even the 6,000 miles that I put on the odometer each year puts about 2.1 tons of greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere, according to this handy dandy carbon footprint travel calculator that I recently found on the Web. Neither do I much like the idea that I’m contributing to the ongoing American orgy of oil consumption that some critics say finances terrorism and/or props up authoritarian regimes in the Middle East. (Of course, it should be mentioned that according to the U.S. Department of Energy, our biggest foreign oil source is decidedly non-authoritarian, non-terroristic Canada.) But I’m in a bind. I can’t afford right now to trade in my circa-1997 clunker for one of those spiffy Toyota Prius hybrids and then shell out another $6,000 or so for the aftermarket modification that’ll enable it to run primarily on electricity. By the same token, I don’t want to feel all angst-ridden every time I get the urge to roll over to the local American Apparel store and buy some hip-looking '70s retro tube socks.

Finding an alternative fuel to replace gasoline, one that would work in old-fashioned internal combustion engines like the one my Saturn has, would be the ideal short-term fix. For years, agribusiness and Midwestern politicians have been touting corn ethanol as the panacea for our plight — one that, perhaps not coincidentally, would also jack up the market price of the crop from which it is made. But switching to corn ethanol wouldn’t do that much to reduce our energy consumption, since according to this CNN.com article, the fuel yields only 40 percent more energy than it takes to cultivate and distill it. It wouldn’t help much with greenhouse gas emissions, either, because burning it produces only 10 percent to 15 percent less of those emissions than gasoline. Beyond that, corn-based ethanol in some ways might actually exacerbate global warming, because as this article explains, it causes U.S. farmers to grow corn instead of soybeans, creating an economic incentive for Brazilian farmers to slash and burn down more of the Amazon rain forest so the land can be used for soy cultivation.

But there is another possibility. I’m enthused about a study recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, entitled “Net Energy of Cellulosic Ethanol from Switchgrass.” The study focused upon switchgrass (Panicum virgatum), a hardy plant that covered great stretches of the North American landscape in the days before farmers supplanted it with food crops and pastureland, and its potential as raw material to make cellulosic ethanol fuel. After switchgrass was grown at 10 farms over a five-year period, researchers found that the resulting biomass was capable of generating more than five times as much energy as it took to cultivate it. Moreover, when the fuel made from the switchgrass was burned, the estimated greenhouse gas emissions were 94 percent lower than what would have been emitted by an equivalent amount of gasoline. Furthermore, cellulosic ethanol isn’t going to put a dent into food crop production or endanger the rain forest, because the hardy, fast-growing perennial can be grown in the U.S. on land  that’s unsuitable for other types of farming.

One of the reseachers, U.S. Department of Agriculture geneticist Ken Vogel, explained the switchgrass study’s significance to the Omaha World Herald:

"This clearly demonstrates that switchgrass is not only energy efficient, but can be used in a renewable biofuel economy to reduce reliance on fossil fuels, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and enhance rural economies," Vogel said.

So what is the downside? Well, critics have argued that cellulosic ethanol would be too expensive to produce in large enough quantities, because turning it into fuel requires enzymes that first have to be slowly and laboriously extracted from organisms such as the fungus Trichoderma reesei, which, unlike our own stomachs, can digest cellulose. That’s why one of corn ethanol’s congressional champions, House Agriculture Committee chairman Colin Peterson of Minnesota, recently predicted that switchgrass is at least a decade away from being a viable alternative to gasoline. "I'm not sure cellulosic ethanol will ever get off the ground,” Reuters quoted him as saying. (Peterson’s home state, it should be mentioned, grows a lot of corn.)

But it turns out that at least two companies, Illinois-based Coskata and the Alternative Energy Technology Center in Texas, are now saying that they can produce cellulosic ethanol for less than $1 a gallon, which would make it significantly cheaper than corn ethanol, and way cheaper than gasoline. And that’s just the start. As this Wired article details, scientists are racing to find cheaper, more efficient methods, such as a genetically engineered microorganism that  would consume cellulose and excrete ethanol, without an intermediate enzyme-extraction process.

Cellulosic ethanol — combined, of course, with the use of other alternative energy sources and increased conservation — seems to me like the obvious way to go. So obvious, in fact, that these days even the ex-oilman currently occupying the White House is talking enthusiastically about using “stalk grass” and wood chips to power our automobiles. But money speaks more truth about priorities, and the actual amount of federal funding for developing cellulosic ethanol technology in the Department of Energy’s FY 2008 budget request is an underwhelming $179 billion. To put things in perspective, the U.S. spends about twice that much each day to fight the war in Iraq. (That’s according to the Iraq Insider blog.)

So here’s my proposal. Instead of aiming to reduce gasoline consumption by 20 percent over the next decade, which is the Bush administration’s target, why don’t we aim higher? After all, JFK set a goal of landing on the moon in 10 years, and American ingenuity made it happen in eight. Let’s ratchet up the research budget by a factor of 10 or 20 — or whatever it takes — and set a goal of completely replacing gasoline with cellulosic ethanol by 2018. Then I finally can drive to the store and buy all the tube socks that I desire, sans remorse. Does that seem reasonable? Feel free to express your opinion below.