The US Federal Governement in 2010 gave several AC of free Federal BLM land to the Nevada power company to expand one of the countries top polution sources-Ried/Gardner Coal Power Plant in Mopa Nevada. This company currently has no plans to purchase power from renewables. Thier stock price went up 100% after the land grant from the "Green Obama Administration". I would have to build an algae farm the size of Belgium to offset the increase in emissions from this huge coal plant. The land grant allows them to operate for decades more. It was a dirty deal that has caused the California snowpack to be nonexistant, i.e drought famine as I said, and impacted the snow related tourisam to our republic. If I was a wild animal I would be dead or thirsty right now. Coal -Won Renewables-Loss To top it off this plant is on the border of a sovergin nation, a native american reservation. The genocide of the red man continues Its alot more efficient than offering 10 USD for the scalp, like in the last century. Please someone take the oposing side and defend fossil fuel investment for me? NV Energy - http://www.nvenergy.com

Besides reducing the number of reactors, it also reduces the risk of contamination. If you want to extract hydrogen along with ethanol, SSF is the best option, because hydrogen can readily escape into atmosphere when you operate between reactors...

Maybe yes! This could possibly reduce the cost of cellulosic ethanol production. The technology involves the use of slender bacterium - Clostridium phytofermentans - which has been found to be capable of coupling two steps as one - convert cellulose into sugars and furthermore into ethanol. This happens when the bacterium is in a high concentration medium, they eat voraciously and leave ethanol behind. The Technology is known as Consolidated BioProcessing (CBP) and has the potential to greatly improve the economics of ethanol production from biomass. For example, the separate production of costly enzymes may be completely eliminated in the Q microbe cellulosic ethanol process. Source: http://www.scribd.com/doc/34712624/0143

Researchers are presently working on using prairie cordgrass as a feedstock for the production of ethanol. The primary aim of the research is to sequence the genes, thereby altering the genetic content to produce better quality offsprings for the production of ethanol. So, it will be a while before the innovation can be taken from the lab to pilot scale, I suppose.

@ Sindhujar That is very much interesting. But as you rightly said, commercialization will be an issue. Such engineered enzymes or enzyme complex will certainly be expensive and large scale use of such enzymes might lead to compromising on the economics of ethanol production. In my opinion, the detoxification would not cost much and skipping the step is not going to improve the process economics especially if some special enzyme complex has to be used.

Studies show that technology with nitric acid for hydrolyzing cellulosic material, rather than sulphuric or hydrochloric acid, for the production of ethanol and other fuels from biomass in municipal solid waste and other feedstock shows a higher yield.

Continuous acid hydrolysis of cellulosic materials result in high yield and productivity and with low investment, the latter being particularly true of agricultural residues, to produce ethanol, single cell protein, lignin coke, furfural, methanol and acetic acid.

Yes, this is very much true. Excess use of fertilizer and excess nitrogen content in particular, will improve the yield of cellulosic ethanol feedstocks, but it increases the lignin content to as much as two times the normal levels. This is because, nitrogen plays a key role in the biochemical process of lignin biosynthesis. Hence excess nitrogen usage will result in complexities in ethanol production by increasing the lignin content more than the usual levels.

The energy in cellulosic biomass largely resides in plant cell walls. But cellulosic biomass is difficult to break down into sugars than starch because of the presence of lignin in cell walls. Separation of lignin from cellulose is energy intensive and hence an economic burden on the paper and other industries. Therefore, reducing the lignin content or changing the composition in pulp yielding plants without compromising the mechanical strength is desirable.