For an additional music contact, Willie Nelson is operating few franchised fuel stops selling "bio diesel." Users have reported that it's pretty good. Unfortunately, bio diesel is more expensive to produce than "plain ol'" so it's viable only with currently available governemt subsidies. Willie quite likely will loss his ass - again.

There are numerous plants making ethanol, and nearly all newer US cars can use gasoline with a fairly high percentage of ethanol. All existing ethanol plants use corn or soybeans as the source material, and the corn to make a gallon of ethanol requires about a gallon of petroleum to produce the fertilizer to grow the corn, and corn requires massive irrigation in many areas where it's grown now.

Again, ethanol is only "cost competitive" with petroleum while government subsidies are in place.

An often ignored factor in the use of ethanol or ethanol containing gasoline is that the products cannot be distributed via pipelines that are in place, due to the problem of moisture absorption. All such fuels currently must be trucked in distribution (which uses a lot of fuel).

Research is ongoing to produce ethanol from cellulosic plant materials like grass, weeds and stems. This requires a separate process to break down the cellulose to starches that can then be fermented to alcohol. One such plant is in planning, but the estimated cost of construction is given as 5 times the cost of an "ethanol from grain" plant of similar capacity.

At least one research group believes that they can "genetically engineer" microbes that will combine the cellulose breakdown and fermentation steps into one "digestion," and they expect to have a "product" within about 5 years. One may hope.

A problem with biological ethanol production is that the alcohol that is produced kills the organism at relatively low concentrations, so constant removal (distillation, usually) is required, and concentration to higher purity is also needed. Genetic manipulations have already produced microbes capable of withstanding - and producing - alcohol concentrations at 5 or 6 times the level tolerated by any "naturally occuring" bacteria, and they are appearing in limited use.

The same researchers who are nearing production of a "combined capability" microbe to digest cellulose and ferment alcohol believe (they say - without revealing where they hold their tongue) that in 5 to 10 years they may be able to produce ^**microbes that will produce octane (gasoline) from weeds and stems.

Burning ethanol or gasoline releases carbon to the atmosphere, but growing plants extract carbon from the atmosphere. With a bio-fuel, the burning can't release more carbon than was fixed by the plants from which it's made, so the portion of fuel that comes from biological sources does result in a "zero sum" transaction - in theory. The next crop grown should "take back" as much carbon as is emitted by using the current crop as fuel - maybe.

^** These people are studying the specific components of the bacterial genome that contribute directly to a) keeping the bacterium alive, b) breaking down cellulose to digestible starches, and c) digesting the starches to produce "bug piss" that's the product wanted. Their anticipated approach will be to strip all genetic information out of a bacterial cell and reinsert only the genetic information needed for the intended use. The genetic components, they believe, will be built up from basic chemicals using currently known recombinant DNA chemistry methods. A living bug created from scratch (?) - sort of. Russian scientists "manufactured" a smallpox virus using similar methods about 15 years ago, using comparitively crude processes; so it doesn't sound as outlandish as it once did.

John