There you go. A Cellulose to Methane ( byproduct ) converter named Daisy.

Now turn the methane (1 carbon, 4 hydrogens) into sugar (6 carbons, 12 hydrogens, 6 oxygens).




Done yet?






How about now?





Still waiting...
-Blast

p.s. where does the tubing enter the cow?

I thought that the name of the game was to produce a fuel that can be used in an internal reciprocating combustion engine.

But the real problem is that the requirement was for a fuel that can be cut with Octane to be used as a liquid fuel for internal combustion engines. Food for mechanical contraptions, heavily subsidised by the Government to skew the economics of the biofuel madness.

Perhaps its the internal combustion engine that is the real problem, or even the over reliance on the internal combustion engine to get folks around from A to B.

As folks get bigger (over consumption of carbohydrate sugars) so do their vehicles. When the reciprocating internal engines go hungry will it be before or after half the folks on planet goes hungry?

More precisely, the internal reciprocating combustion engines already owned by millions of people, without modification of those engines.

-Blast, trying to imagine what a methane-powered jet plane would look like.

p.s. I'm also imagining huge "factory" complexes with thousands of cows caged up in rows, a tube feeding them switchgrass at one end and a methane collection unit attached to the other end. *shudder*

The 1976 GM Firebird 2, just in time for the middle east fuel crisis.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TH3d3nQX4L0

Henry Ford did that around the turn of the previous century. Most of his vehicles were dual-fuel: alcohol and gasoline. In the city, where petroleum was available, people used gasoline. When they were in the country, where most farmers made their own alcohol, they would use home brew.

My work Suburban is dual fuel as it sits in the driveway.

The current method of making ethanol from sugar- and starch-rich plants like cattails and sugar/fodder beets is still the simplest and cheapest way to go. They may find ways eventually to use cellulose, but not right now.



Ummm... like that's never happened before?



Powerful, compact, easy, cheap... Of course! We've been indoctrinated to believe that everything must be easy and cheap. The be-all and end-all of our existence.



I guess you shouldn't look now, but they're almost there. Just replace the switchgrass with the corn they're already using:



I guess they're just looking for a cheap source of tubing from China. And some No Smoking signs...

Sue

Henry Ford envisioned that ethanol made from plant matter would be the best way to power vast new fleets of automobiles. Besides Henry Ford, didn't Rudolf Diesel originally design his engines to run on vegetable or seed oils, not petroleum? Funny how ideas that we think are new are actually quite old. They even had electric cars way back then.

You left out the really important quote from that article:
But yields from a grass that only needs to be planted once would deliver an average of 13.1 megajoules of energy as ethanol for every megajoule of petroleum consumed—in the form of nitrogen fertilizers or diesel for tractors—growing them. "It's a prediction because right now there are no biorefineries built that handle cellulosic material" like that which switchgrass provides, Vogel notes. "We're pretty confident the ethanol yield is pretty close." This means that switchgrass ethanol delivers 540 percent of the energy used to produce it, compared with just roughly 25 percent more energy returned by corn-based ethanol according to the most optimistic studies.

That switchgrass article itself states it's calculations are all theoretical.Yeast can't break cellulose down into alcohol. The cellulose must first be broken down into it's component sugars, which is something mankind has yet to master.
-Blast

p.s. FYI, when the trick of breaking cellulose down into yeast-friendly sugars is discovered you won't have to worry trying to find cellulose-based ethanol over corn-based ethanol. It will ALL be cellulose-based. [/quote]

I defer to your chemistry expertise of which I have none, but there are already a lot of cellulosic ethanol plants up and running, but most don't use switchgrass yet:

Commercial Cellulosic Ethanol Plants in the U.S.[73][74]
(Operational or under construction)

Company..... Location..... Feedstock

Abengoa Bioenergy Hugoton, KS Wheat straw
BlueFire Ethanol Irvine, CA Multiple sources
Colusa Biomass Energy Corporation Sacramento, CA Waste rice straw
Coskata Warrenville, IL Biomass, Agricultural and Municipal wastes
DuPont Danisco Cellulosic Ethanol (DDCE) Vonore, TN Corn cobs, switchgrass
Fulcrum BioEnergy Reno, NV Municipal solid waste
Gulf Coast Energy Mossy Head, FL Wood waste
KL Energy Corp. Upton, WY Wood
Mascoma Lansing, MI Wood
POET LLC Emmetsburg, IA Corn cobs
Range Fuels[75] Treutlen County, GA Wood waste
SunOpta Little Falls, MN Wood chips
SweetWater Energy Rochester, NY Multiple Sources
US Envirofuels Highlands County, FL Sweet sorghum
Xethanol Auburndale, FL Citrus peels

Byrd_Huntr, that's excellent information, thanks for the list! I checked the different plants out and currently they are all "pilot plant" scale designed more to test the technology rather than full-scale production plants. Still, it's a start.
They all seem to be using variations of acid hydrolysis to break down the cellulose down into yeast-friendly sugars. BlueFire Ethanol, Inc.'s technology page has a good description of the process. In the past this has been tricky to do on a large scale as it needs constant, minute tweaks to the batch as it is broken down otherwise you get a run-away reaction which can be very damaging. Advances in computer-controlled "tweaking" seems to be the key to these different plants. It'll be interesting to watch what improvements these companies make on the actual chemistry of the process.

-Blast

The Department of Energy just announced that they will be providing loan guarantees for POET (already listed in Byrd_Hunter's list) so they can build the first commercial-scale cellulosic ethanol plant, which will be completed sometime in 2013. Output should be up to 25 million gallons a year.