As an alternative fuel, ethanol derived from corn has hit a serious road block. That's because producing corn ethanol itself requires lots of energy – after factoring in pesticides, fertilizers, and fossil fuels used to grow the corn, ethanol generates only about 1.24 times the energy it takes to produce, according to the United States Department of Agriculture. Corn has been the favored feedstock for making ethanol in the US because it can be easy to grow and transport – and because growing corn for fuel is heavily subsidized through government tax credits. However, producing ethanol from corn has led to an increase in corn prices, which could soon affect the world’s food supply and populations that rely on corn as a staple food.

The answer, according to AIC Labs, is to make ethanol not from corn alone but from a range of cellulosic materials, including switchgrass, wheat straw, and even biowaste such as dead wood, corn stalks, and yard clippings. In essence, the most promising source from which to make ethanol, according to AIC Labs’s Chief Technology Officer Robert Clarke, is trash.

“What AIC is developing,” says Clarke, “is a low-cost technology for generating biofuels out of cellulosic waste and abundant, unwanted feedstocks.” By using an electrochemical process called Mediated Metal Redox (MMR), any organic material – even man-made organic waste such as sewage and newsprint – can be broken down and converted from cellulose into fermentable starches and sugars, and thus into ethanol and other fuels. "It's an exciting breakthrough for making biofuels far more efficient,” says Clarke.

Applied to ethanol, MMR could avoid the need to convert high value food into fuel. Because the MMR process has the potential to convert every part of the plant – including lignin, the skeletal component of all plant matter that can’t be digested by humans or used traditionally to make biomass fuels – into a usable form, the energy yields for alternative fuels becomes much, much higher. •••

AIC is pleased to announce the formation of a wholly-owned subsidiary RedOx Biofuels, the purpose of which is to commercialize AIC’s proprietary metal mediated redox (“MMR”) technology for use in the production of biofuels from a variety of ligno-cellulosic feedstocks.   

Sources
USDA, “Estimating the Net Energy Balance of Corn Ethanol,”Agricultural Economics Report No. (AER721), 24 pp,
July 1995.

“Ethanol fuels largest corn crop since ’44,” The Associated Press, March 31, 2007.

Makers of ethanol receive a tax credit of $.51 per gallon under the Energy Policy Act of 2005.