Super Yeast + Pine Trees = Car Fuel

When I read the title of the EurekAlert! press release, UGA researchers develop ‘super’ yeast that turns pine into ethanol, I found it a little unsettling.  First of all, I’ve seen enough disease outbreak catastrophe movies, including the sub-genre of zombie movies that choose to use disease outbreak as an underlying cause of the zombie infestation, to know that I can’t truly trust a super version of any microscopic single-celled creature, even something as innocuous as yeast.  Who knows, perhaps the end of the world will actually come from dealing with an army of man-eating loaves of bread.

Secondly, the idea of pine tree tasting alcohol doesn’t do much for me as it sounds kind of gross.

Thirdly, are we really wanting to make fuel out of one of our most precious resources in which we have already nearly completely decimated across the country in the last two hundred years.  I’m not a tree-hugger, but I am a logical environmentalist, and I’m sorry, using pine trees to make car fuel has disaster written all over it.

The research is sound and it is pretty interesting.  Ethanol is often known as “grain alcohol.”  It is much easier to ferment ethanol from grain than wood.  When you ferment wood, normally you would get “wood alcohol” which is also known as methanol.  Methanol is quite poisonous (it will make you blind and then kill you if you drink it) but can also be used as an effective fuel source.  Political advantage in this country; however, has made ethanol the fuel of choice,

Getting ethanol from wood is difficult. Researchers have found that by pre-treating the trees with heat and chemicals,the wood’s cellulose can be broken down into useable sugars.  The yeast, which was developed from yeast used in the conversion process of corn to ethanol, is added to the treated wood.  The wood is then fermented to ethanol.

Although this conversion of wood to alcohol is efficient, relatively speaking, the press release does not actually mention how many trees it would need to fuel a car, let alone several cars.  The use of pine trees is attractive for many people, due to its proclaimed sustainability through the use of tree farms or tree plantations.  In my opinion, we are kidding ourselves, if we think that trees grown on a handful of farms can possibly sustain us let alone end the energy crisis.  I could be wrong, but I feel that we would reach a point very rapidly in which the amount of trees grown and harvested by tree farmers would not be able to meet the needs of the population, which would entail, as it usually does, going that extra “evil” step and begin chopping down our forests.  Profits usually are more important than common sense.

But with that said, I am really not cow-towing on this research.  It is interesting, innovative and is suggesting alternative resources for fuel.  This and similar research can only go forward, eventually (hopefully sooner rather than later) finding an end to our energy crisis.  Also at the more local level, maybe pine trees could be an effective fuel source, as long as they never go past the farms and into the forests.