Soonish by Kelly Weinersmith & Zach Weinersmith

Author:Kelly Weinersmith & Zach Weinersmith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2017-10-17T04:00:00+00:00

They are currently seeing if the process can be made cheap and scaled up.

Another group is working on a way to go from switchgrass to jet fuel. If you’ve never heard of it, switchgrass is a tall green plant that’s all over North America. It’s a hardy grass that grows quickly and densely, even in bad soil.

In case you don’t remember high school botany, cellulose is one of the main structural components in plants. Cellulose is a very long chain of sugar molecules. So perhaps you’re now thinking, “Why don’t trees taste good when I lick them? I keep licking all sorts of plants but they’re almost never sweet!”

First, stop it. Second, cellulose chains are pretty hard to break down into tasty sugar molecules. Unless you have specially developed enzymes to break down cellulose sugar, you can’t digest it. This is why cows have complex digestive systems—they’re doing God’s work of converting stubbornly hard-to-digest grass into beef.

But doing your business inside a cow is never a good way to go. So, Dr. Aindrila Mukhopadhyay’s group at the Joint BioEnergy Institute created bacteria that can convert renewable plant resources (like switchgrass) into d-limonene, a precursor to jet fuel. Her group’s modified bacteria can take pretreated switchgrass, break the cellulose into little sugars, then turn those sugars into d-limonene.

They are hoping to get the process to the point where the bacteria spit out straight-up jet fuel, but getting to d-limonene in one pot already cuts out a lot of steps you normally need to make bio-jet fuel. And, because the carbon source is the airborne CO2 that the switchgrass converted into cellulose, in principle, you could get your jet fuel without adding much CO2 to the atmosphere.

Biofuels like this have enormous potential to reduce our reliance on petroleum-based products, but so far cost has been a serious issue. Petroleum prices continue to be quite low, so it may be some time before we’re using weeds to fly to Amsterdam.

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