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July 2010
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Micro organisms are
playing a big role in the development of sustainable biofuel that could
help reduce society’s dependence on fossil fuels. According to online publication Simply Green, the latest example is a breakthrough from a University of Wisconsin research team that could lead to a low cost, high yield process for extracting energy from cellulosic biomass, using a specially developed strain of bacteria. Cellulosic biomass includes woody nonfood crops like trees, brush and certain grasses. Until now the difficulty has been finding an efficient way to break down the plant cell wall in woody plants in order to extract the sugar molecules needed to produce biofuel. One approach is to develop new bacteria to do the job and the new research recently unearthed a likely candidate, Cellvibrio japonicus, a type of bacteria found in soil. With food crops such as corn and soybeans rapidly falling out of favour for a variety of reasons - not the least being the threat to global food security - poplar trees and other non-food sources of biofuel are coming to the fore. The report claims sustainable biofuel crops can be grown on marginal lands with less water, pesticides and herbicides than food crops require. An added benefit is that it is not necessary to cut down the entire tree in order to produce a regular harvest. |
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