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Is corn-based ethanol the answer?
In his State of the Union address, President Bush said he wants us to cut our gasoline consumption by 20 percent in the next 10 years. E-85 might be one way to do that. The fuel comes from corn, and farmers love it: corn-based ethanol is a billion-dollar industry in Minnesota. But at the University of Minnesota's Initiative for Renewable Energy and the Environment, researchers are convinced corn alone can't be the future base of alternative fuel. ?It's a piece of the answer,? said Dick Hemmingsen, the initiative?s director. ?In fact, if we turned all of the corn in the U.S. into ethanol, with current yields ? current conversion of corn to ethanol ? it would meet maybe 12 percent of our transportation needs.? What's more, corn-based ethanol fuel is not very efficient. Though it currently costs 20 percent less than unleaded gas, E-85?s mileage is, on average, 25 to 30 percent lower. Hemmingsen says researchers are looking to the next generation of ethanol. University of Minnesota biologists are looking at mixtures of prairie grasses. Not just one kind of grass, but a mixture of flowering plants that could be turned into fuel. And prairie-grass fuel could yield 51 percent more energy per acre than ethanol from corn. Prairie grass also requires much less energy to grow than corn. And it absorbs carbon dioxide, so it actually helps the environment, whereas corn fuel simply doesn't hurt the environment as much as gas. And Hemmingsen says it doesn't end there. ?Corn stalks, wheat straw, livestock waste is an interesting biomass for converting to energy,? he said. ?And, last but not least, algae and microorganisms,? could be sources for generating fuels. ?So there will be a number of biomass materials converted into a number of fuels, which we're using today,? he said. ?And all will be needed to climb this big mountain of fossil fuel dependency.? But here's something important to keep in mind: Transportation fuels only account for just one-third of all of the energy we use. And Hemmingsen says, if the global demand for energy keeps growing at its current pace, there won't be enough energy from any source to keep up with our needs.
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