Innovation Pipeline

When it comes to the merits of counting carbon as a remedy to improve the health of our planet, there’s plenty of room for debate and dissension. It’s also quickly becoming a major obsession and perhaps a real distraction from important policy work that needs to get done.

A recent paper in Science, “Fixing a Critical Climate Accounting Error” shed light on the way carbon is being counted in current U.S. climate legislation and in the Kyoto Protocol. The accounting problem could undermine efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by using biofuels made from biomass. If the carbon is not correctly accounted for in calculations, resulting policies and practices may become counterproductive.

It all comes down to greenhouse gas consequences. If, for example, fast growing biofuel crops are grown on abandoned farmland, they can capture more carbon than existing plants and thus reduce greenhouse gas emissions. However, if existing forests are cut down and replaced with bioenergy crops, the carbon released from the soil and mature trees plus the loss of future carbon storage is greater than the carbon captured by the crops.

There’s also the environmental impact of source plants for biofuels grown on the land. How do they impact the existing ecology of the land and species?

That was a key question at the heart of scientists inquiry about the unintended consequences of crop-based biofuels, which may result in the loss of wildlife habitat by researchers from Michigan Technological University and the Nature Conservancy.

The researchers reported their findings and analysis in the recent issue of BioScience in which they examined how the conversion of grasslands to corn for ethanol production poses a threat to wildlife habitat.

Scientists suggested one solution would be to use diverse native prarie plants to produce bioenergy instead of a single agricultural crop like corn. No doubt, the growing demand for corn ethanol driven by U.S. government mandates to produce 136 billion liters of biofuels by 2022 is helping bring about massive land-use changes that scientists say hasn’t happened since the virgin praries were first plowed during the settling of the U.S. more than 200 years ago.

Another group of engineering researchers at Louisiana Tech University are putting to work nanotechnology to help improve the overall efficiency of cellulosic ethanol. Unlike corn-based ethanol biofuels, the cellulosic process uses non-food biomass sources like wood, grass and corn stovers.

The nanotechnology is being employed to immobilize the expensive cellulosic enzymes used to break down the rugged plant material so they can be reused several times. In doing so, the high cost of enzymes is reduced. The chemical engineers say the nanotech-enabled process can be used in large scale commercial environments with a wide variety and mixture of enzymes.

Agriculture researchers in Arkansas are also putting nanotechnology to work to help improve the overall growth of biofuel crops. Scientists recently reported in the ACS Nano monthly journal that carbon nanotubes (CNT) enhance the germination by two times faster in tomato seeds exposed to CNTs. The seeds were larger, heavier than control seeds not treated with CNTs. Scientists said the nanotubes penetrate the seed coat and boost water uptake. This relatively new area of nano-agriculture is aimed at improving the productivity of plants for food, fuel and other uses. By Lee Bruno