“Farmers in Nebraska and the Dakotas brought the U.S. closer to becoming a biofuel economy, planting huge tracts of land for the first time with switchgrass—a native North American perennial grass (Panicum virgatum) that often grows on the borders of cropland naturally—and proving that it can deliver more than five times more energy than it takes to grow it.”
[i]"The study completed by Frank Dohleman of the Plant Biology Department at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and his colleagues, is the first to compare the productivity of the two grasses in side-by-side field trials. Results from trials throughout Illinois show that Miscanthus is more than twice as productive as switchgrass.
Dohleman’s team, which included Dafu Wang, Andrew D.B. Leakey & Stephen P. Long also of University of Illinois, along with Emily A. Heaton of Ceres Inc., theorized that Miscanthus produces more usable biomass than switchgrass because of these three key attributes:
Miscanthus can gain greater amounts of photosynthetic carbon per unit of leaf area
Miscanthus has a greater leaf area
Miscanthus has a longer growing season."[/url]
Pretty good news for bio-fuel. Now the work is needed on facilities for doing this coversion.
After listening to stories from my relatives in Iowa I think very hard to change from corn to any other alternative. The corn farmers have been making much money since starting selling corn to make gas. Their lobbying efforts are now are on verge of expanding the corn gas program beyond just summer months to being for the full year.
If they can switch crop and get guaranteed sales at a certain price…well, then maybe can move away from corn.
That’s known as E10 in Australia, and was resisted due to issues with ethanol and fuel line components. But many newer cars have fixed the issues.
Also available in a few places but not as widely as hoped is E85. That’s 85 % ethanol, and is more energy dense than 98 octane and delivers more power in the same engine. If it’s capable of handling ethanol.
Car racers like that a lot. But for daily use you need more places that supply E85
Or use a flex fuel sensor with advanced engine control system and run on any mix of the two.
It’s next-to-impossible to get anything else (the 10% blend) where I’m based in the Philippines. Every few hours I have to clean all the gunk and slime out of my brushcutter engine. It tends to gum up the float valve, so it sticks closed.
This sort of nonsense only happens because sugarcane has no other profitable market, and there are a lot of rich people there who want to grow sugarcane (for some unfathomable reason). As usual, subsidies and secret-handshake politics keep the whole thing afloat. A more sensible solution would be to permit the import of modern engines, which are at least 10% more efficient (and cleaner) than the cheap Chinese shit belching out fumes on the average road. But that would mean less profits for the guys in charge.
I should be going all-electric sometime this year. I have the solar capacity installed - just need to make some custom DC-DC converters so the tools can run from the batteries I’m using.