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Lynd 22 (1:44)
Topic(s): Biofuels / Future Transport
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Video Transcript
Plants do pretty well in nature because they have been in a
competitive environment where grazing animals, beetles,
wood-boring birds, you name it, attack these things and plants
are tough in the face of these attacks. And precisely that
toughness, if you will, is really, frankly the central
obstacle we need to overcome from a processing point of view.
You can readily show, with, you know, various analytical
tools, you can readily show that once you convert cellulosic
biomass to its component sugars, the rest of the con— if
that could be done for free, hypothetically, in other words,
if we could over nature's toughness at— with high
efficiency and low cost, the rest of the process, although
there are improvements that could be made, is essentially
ready to roll, and you would have very cost-competitive fuels.
And so the thing that is absolutely required in order to lower
the cost of processing is, again, at high efficiency and
high— and low cost, to convert the biomass into its
component sugars.
We're pursuing a potential home run. I think it's probably
interesting to know not only what we think, but what the rest
of the world thinks. My perception and understanding of the
rests of the world's opinion is that this home run is
tremendously ambitious, but very likely the ultimate way that
it will happen. Many people think it's decades away. We think
that it's a few years from proof of concept and it's very
easily described.
