Static & Crosstalk
Dr. E. Thomas Chesworth
Two professors at the University of Maryland have started a company called Zymetis and are making (not going to make) an artificial enzyme called Ethazyme. So what? Well, it seems our two intrepid researchers found a small supply of a bacterium called S. degradans which has an enzyme that quickly breaks cellulose down into sugar. But they couldn't find any more wild bacteria, and farming the bacteria they have is problematic. So much for the goose that laid the golden egg.
Now comes the paradox. Drs. Hutcheson and Weiner didn't just throw up their hands in despair. They synthesized the enzyme. It's predicted that the market for it will be $5 billion by 2022 -- fourteen short years as they say.
So why all the hubbub? Well, with the enzyme you turn cellulose into sugar and with yeast you turn the sugar into alcohol and with the alcohol you run the engines of trucks, busses and the ever-popular family sedan. A projected 75 billion gallons a year of alcohol. That will save a lot of gasoline.
The Middle East is a desert, but eastern and central North America, not to mention California and the rest of the left coast, are prime farmland. Now who has the largest fuel reserves, Ali?
This process doesn't affect food production. Consider grapes. You pick them, make wine, then turn the pomace, leaves, shoots and tendrils which are pruned off anyway into fuel. Or corn -- you pick the ears and make bourbon, then turn the leaves and stalks into fuel. Who doesn't love kudzu? You cut it down and turn it into fuel -- you may get two or three cuttings a year -- the stuff grows like a weed. It is a weed. There are any number of fast-growing herbaceous plants that are weeds and grow like weeds. Why limit ourselves to food plants? We'll make fuel from old newspapers and they'll be collecting and paying us for our lawn clippings. And nobody's environment gets Gored.
As the plants grow they breathe in carbon dioxide (take it out of the atmosphere), drink water and convert them into cellulose, sugar and oxygen. When you burn the fuel, you simply put the carbon dioxide and water back where you got it and there is no net gain in the dreaded greenhouse gas. It's not like fossil fuels where you dig up the carbon where it was a safe solid or liquid, burn it and create more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere where it is supposed to raise the global temperature and melt down our civilization, not to mention the ever-popular polar bears.
Why not go whole hog and use alcohol to cook our food? And have fuel cells in our basement to make electricity for our lights and rotating machinery, refrigerators, fans, elevators and such. The alcohol could be delivered by tank truck or pipe lines and we could get rid of those ugly overhead wires. It would be safe to fly kites again on the street in front of our houses. Every winter hundreds of miles of wires come down in ice storms. Think of the money saved in neighborhood wiring repair alone. And think of the people who would be sitting warm and cozy in their family room watching the boob tube instead of freezing in the dark because of an ice storm.
The real payoff will be in about 20 or 30 years when the wells run dry. We can sell alcohol to OPEC at inflated prices. We can even square the price when they get sassy.