I wish someone on the Digg made this one up, but when read it "from the source", I was a little sick. A "biofuel" alternative showed up as "new, news" today... I was looking to validate the source, and stumbled across "news to me", ... that the senate was made aware of the "hidden" annual $780 billion cost of import oil and similar "biomass" alternatives nearly two years ago and that waiting has cost 2 Trillion already. The longer they wait, the longer the $8 Trillion CONSEQUENCE awaits (yes that is $27,000 for every man, woman and child living in America)... www.senate.gov/~foreign/testimony/2006/CopulosTestimony060330.pdf
CHICAGO (Reuters) - Researchers believe that by boosting the efficiency of biofuel production through a hydrogen-carbon system, the United States could use that same amount of current biomaterial (1.366 billion tons of biomass) to supply the entire US transportation system.
By recycling the carbon dioxide wasted in current manufacturing methods, scientists at Purdue University in Indiana believe they could reduce the amount of plant and plant-derived material required to make biofuels.
Such a method could help address some of the recent backlash against grain-derived biofuels, which are blamed for raising the wholesale price of corn and ultimately boosting the cost of food. "This decouples the food problem from the transportation problem," said Rakesh Agrawal, a chemical engineer at Purdue
The result, he said, would be a completely efficient system that could vastly reduce the amount of materials needed to produce biofuels.
