The Environmental Protection Agency apparently has a regulation on the books that requires refiners to add cellulosic ethanol to the fuel they produce. But the refiners are not adding the chemical because they say the product doesn’t exist in commercial quantities. In other words it’s a laboratory creation and is too expensive to make in large quantities. EPA press releases say that they expected cellulosic ethanol to be available at the time the regulation went into effect, but that didn’t happen and the agency is refusing to reevaluate its position. It must be nice to require an unavailable product and then hold producers accountable when the product isn’t unavailable!
I did a short internet search and found that cellulosic ethanol is not made from corn, but instead uses grasses such as switch grass, hemp, assorted plant waste and/or wood chips to produce alcohol. These are all non food products and it certainly makes sense to convert them to a fuel additive but it seems to be an expensive process because the conversion requires sugar and these items don’t have a lot of convertible sugar within their cellular structure. There is a research outfit that has been trying since 2001 to develop an enzyme that will cheapen the process but to date they have been unsuccessful. Since they have been doing this under a contract with EPA it boggles the mind that EPA didn’t pay attention. An agency that doesn’t pay attention to the real world is not something we need to listen to in these times.
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