America’s first corn-to-ethanol conversion plant just opened in Iowa

So far, the largest biofuels efforts have involved the age-old process of converting sugars in plants into ethanol. If biofuels are ever to make a significant dent in fossil fuel use, however, they’re probably going to have to be made from something that can’t also be used as food (either by us or our farm animals.) That means working with something other than sugar. The leading candidate is cellulose, a robust polymer of sugars that give plants the strength to grow several hundred feet tall. Breaking down cellulose into sugars (which can then be converted into ethanol) is not easy to do economically, although a lot of research has gone into finding processes that work. A leading candidate for this is to use the enzymes from bacteria and fungi that normally decompose wood. The US Energy Information Agency has announced that the nation’s first commercial-scale plant based on this approach has just opened in Iowa.