Sorry Sarah, but we may not have to destroy the Arctic Wild Life Reserve to replace fossil fuels from abroad, if you'll pardon the pun. No drill, no spill.
Biofuels, like ethanol made from corn, consume lots of energy and water and take a lot of land to produce. Cellulosic materials, like wood chips and grass are more efficient than corn and take no crops out of the food chain. A new start-up company based in Cambridge, MA, named Joule Biotechnologies, claims they can make 20,000 gallons of biofuels per year per acre. This is phenomenal since so far only algae-based biofuels come even close to this new technology, only producing from 2,000 to 6,000 gallons per acre per year. This new process is of the scale of production that can make biofuels a viable substitute for fossil fuels. It could mean that biofuels could replace all fossil fuels for transportation. How are these quantities achieved and what is the process?...
