As one Defra agency appears to be finally learning the painful lessons of IT rollouts gone wrong, another seems to have walked into the same trap. Biofuel breakthrough on non-food crops
MOTORISTS could soon be running their cars on affordable ethanol produced from wheat straw or woodchips after a biofuel breakthrough.
Current methods of converting agricultural by-products into ethanol are too expensive to consider at a commercial level, while biofuels produced from food crops have been blamed for pushing up commodity prices and leaving the world’s poorest people short of food.
But a Danish biotechnology company, Novozymes, says it has cultivated a new enzyme that could convert maize, wheat, straw and woodchips into ethanol for as little as 32 pence per litre.
The biotechnology company claims it would be the first time agricultural waste had been converted into biofuel at such a competitive price.
The new enzyme, known as Cellic CTec2, breaks down cellulose in the waste into simple sugars, which are then used to produce the ethanol.
“We have been working on this for the past 10 years and promised our customers and the market to be ready by 2010,” said Steen Riisgaard, Novozymes chief executive.
Large-scale commercial production of the cellulosic ethanol could begin as early as 2011.
