www.checkbiotech.org ; www.raupp.info ; www.czu.cz

The government awarded $385 million in grants last week aimed at
jumpstarting ethanol production -- which will consume approximately half of
the country's corn supply this year. Also, nontraditional sources like wood
chips, switchgrass and citrus peels are being considered. What's surprising
is that half of the six projects chosen will use a process first discovered
almost a century ago to turn coal into a gas, March 2007.

President Bush set a goal in his State of the Union address of producing
20 percent of the nation's fuel supply from renewable resources by 2017.
Much of those supplies will come from the conversion of corn into enthanol,
fueled by a boom in new ethanol plant construction that's already under way.

Thursday, the Agriculture Department reported that half of this year's U.S.
corn crop will be consumed by ethanol producers. Critics say that means
surging demand for corn could push up prices of everything from
corn-sweetened soft drinks to meats, since corn is a common feed ingredient
for livestock.

That helps explain why the Energy Department is placing a big bet on a
process called gasification. Long hailed as a more environmentally friendly
way to turn coal into electricity, the process might also provide a faster
and eventually cheaper way to produce ethanol from a variety of renewable
sources collectively known as biomass, some scientists say.

Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman pegged the current cost of gasification as
being about twice as much as the average $1.10 per gallon cost at corn-based
ethanol plants.

Gasification is a fairly simple process, based on chemistry developed in the
1920s, said Robert Brown, an Iowa State University chemical engineering
professor and director of the school's Office of Biorenewables Programs.

The syngas produced during gasification mixes more readily with chemical
catalysts, so it could be more easily turned into other fuels, chemicals and
materials. Just add steam and you could produce hydrogen to power a
fuel-cell vehicle, Brown said.

Of the six companies awarded U.S. Department of Energy grants, three will
use versions of fermentation technology. But two others will use
gasification and one will use a hybrid of both technologies:

? Alico Inc., a LaBelle, Fla.-based agribusiness company, would get up to
$33 million to turn yard waste, wood waste and citrus peel into syngas,
which would then be converted into ethanol, electricity and hydrogen.

? Range Fuels Inc., of Broomfield, Colo., would get up to $76 million for a
plant near Soperton, Ga., to convert timber scraps into syngas to make
ethanol and methanol.

? Abengoa Bioenergy, a St. Louis-based division of Spain's Abengoa SA, would
receive up to $76 million for an 11.4 million gallons-per-year plant in
Colwich, Kan., that would use both biochemical and thermochemical processes
to convert corn stalks, wheat straw and switchgrass.

The Energy Department helped demonstrate the viability of gasification in
the mid-1990s when it awarded Georgia-based FERCO $9.2 million to help build
a power plant running on wood chips. By 2001, the $18 million plant in
Burlington, Vt., was generating more than 200 megawatt-hours of electricity
a day.

Mark Paster, a U.S. Department of Energy technology development manager
who's studying ways to turn biomass into hydrogen, said both fermentation
and gasification "are very viable and both routes continue to be researched
and developed."

Paster said biomass helps reduce greenhouse gasses, so any method that can
reach commercial viability will be better than one based on fossil fuel.

"There may not be a single winner, just like there's no winner in how we
produce electricity," he said. "We do it in a variety of ways."

[kutv.com]