Alternative Energy: New Sugarcanes To Deliver One-Two Energy Punch

ScienceDaily (Oct. 20, 2008) — New varieties of sugarcane and other crops adapted to the U.S. Gulf Coast region are being developed for use in making ethanol as a cleaner-burning alternative to gasoline.Agricultural Research Service (ARS) scientists, in cooperation with the Louisiana Agricultural Experiment Station (LAES) and the American Sugar Cane League, USA (ASCL), have already released three new varieties of “energy sugarcane.” They’re called that because of their high stalk contents of sugar and fiber, which could eventually serve as complementary ethanol feedstocks.

Raw-sugar processors now burn the fiber to generate heat that powers stalk-crushing and sugar-crystallization processes, notes Edward Richard, who leads the ARS Sugarcane Research Unit in Houma, La. The extracted sucrose sugar is sold for consumption or converted into ethanol. However, Richard anticipates that biorefineries will use the fiber as well, once technologies for converting cellulose into ethanol become economically feasible.

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This entry was written by Deborah and posted on October 21, 2008 at 2:56 am and filed under climate. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Trackbacks are closed, but you can post a comment.

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2 Comments so far (Add 1 more)

Very interesting – lets hope people don’t try to drink the sugar cane juice instead of putting it in their vehicles.

1. Shauna on October 28th, 2008 at 5:06 pm
Bravo for another great article about renewable fuel. Anyway, I pestered the Departments of Energy and griculutre with the recommendation that they plant corn to be used exclusively for making ethanol on toxic waste areas, and use our nation’s unlimited supply of sewage to fertilize it. You cannot do that with foodcrops, because the sewage poisons the food, but what if we exploited this truly-unlimited source of manure, sewage rather, to fertilize biocrops VERY cheaply? If we only use the biocrop, corn, sugar cane, whatever, for making ethanol, the fact that you can’t ever EAT it would not be a problem, if we ONLY use the corn grown this way exclusively for making fuel, and we could make a dent in in our energy independence that way.

2. Robert Schreib on October 21st, 2008 at 5:14 pm