CELLULOSIC ETHANOL PRODUCTION research moves forward at Tech:
The partnership, first established in 2005, seeks to find methods of producing ethanol from cellulosic biomass by focusing on four areas: steam explosion for pre-treating the biomass; advanced enzymes for hydrolyzing steam exploded biomass; a composite predictive model coupling with economic analysis; and finally scaling up of steam explosion, hydrolysis and fermentation.
This is particularly useful in light of the potentially devastating side-effects of the current corn-based ethanol mania, which is essentially based on the brilliant idea of losing money while burning food.