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Lynd 10 (1:24)
Topic(s): Biofuels / Future Transport
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Video Transcript
Corn has brought us a long way. And everybody who's interested
in doing cellulosic biomass acknowledges that it would be much
more difficult to do cellulosic biomass to ethanol were
it— if corn ethanol were not here. That said, the most
optimistic estimates I've heard for how much corn ethanol
could be produced, are somewhere in the 10 to 20 billion
gallons of ethanol range, which you'd multiply by about
two-thirds to get gasoline equivalent. So in round numbers,
less than 10% of current gasoline production.
Now, that can be a very important industry from many points of
view, including rural communities. But it amounts to about the
amount of growth in gasoline consumption over, say, the last,
I don't know, five to eight years. And so if we're really
looking for large, large-scale solutions—and I hasten to
say that we need to broaden our search for those, not only to
include supply technologies like ethanol, but also
technologies that relate to how efficiently we utilize energy
sources of all kinds—if we're really looking for
large-scale solutions, few people offer unlimited— few
if anyone, frankly—offers unlimited corn production as,
for example, how we might produce, let's say, 50 billion
gallons of gasoline equivalent, which starts to be a
significant mark; it starts to approach the level of oil
imports currently.
