Food and fuel from cellulose

Gord_in_Toronto

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Gord_in_Toronto
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Scientists Turn Corn Husks Into Dinner

A team of researchers at Virginia Tech recently succeeded in transforming cellulose into starch, a process that could be used to find new nutrient sources from plants not traditionally thought of as food crops. And at 20 to 40 percent of a person’s daily caloric intake, starch is an important- and increasingly scarce- resource in today’s world.
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http://www.technewsdaily.com/17779-scientists-turn-corn-husks-into-dinner.html

Does this mean the end of hunger and the creation of cheap fuel?

I would have liked to see some idea of the cost of the process and for its scaling into a commercial product.

But, if it pans out, this is the most hopeful thing I have read in sometime.

:yahoo
 
Gord_in_Toronto said:
Scientists Turn Corn Husks Into Dinner



http://www.technewsdaily.com/17779-scientists-turn-corn-husks-into-dinner.html

Does this mean the end of hunger and the creation of cheap fuel?

I would have liked to see some idea of the cost of the process and for its scaling into a commercial product.

But, if it pans out, this is the most hopeful thing I have read in sometime.

:yahoo
Click to expand...

Never mind the financial cost. That's the easy bit. The real cost analysis is the energy-in vs energy-out cost.

Mike
 
Here's the abstract: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/04/12/1302420110

Here's a thorough news article: http://www.vtnews.vt.edu/articles/2013/04/041613-cals-zhangstarch.html

This looks really good. If it holds up, it's by far the most important news I've seen in a long time, easily dwarfing what happened in Boston a few days ago. (Not that this thread will ever get a tenth as many posts, though.)

There's no thermodynamic reason why the energy-in/energy-out balance cannot be very favorable. Cellulose has almost the same chemical energy as starch. And the authors claim that the process doesn't require heat or energetic chemical reagents, just reusable catalysts derived from biological sources.

Even cows and pigs can't eat dead leaves. I remove several tons of those from my yard every year. (Dead leaves, not cows and pigs.) If I could shove them into a hopper and convert them to pasta and bioethanol instead, it would be nearly as good as having a goddamned Mr. Fusion.

Now, it's not quite there yet: the starch being produced is amylose, which is not broken down in the human digestive system and is therefore not a source of caloric nutrition, though it can be useful as "dietary fiber," which we used to call "roughage."

As for the glucose portion of the output, the device needed to turn glucose into ethanol is, I believe, called a "still" and has its own inefficiencies, but glucose itself is also food in a pinch.

Respectfully,
Myriad
 
Direct access to cellulose, rather than via goats and cattle and such, seems to me a potential game-changer. There's vast amounts of the stuff out there, and more comes along every day.

Tie this in with in vitro meat production and you'd have a real winner, I reckon.
 
WhatRoughBeast said:
We already convert cellulose to food and fuel - steaks on the grill. That's good enough for me.
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Have you considered that this breakthrough isn't targetted at those who already have access to too much food, but rather those who are poor and malnourished :rolleyes:
 
Giraffe107 said:
Have you considered that this breakthrough isn't targetted at those who already have access to too much food, but rather those who are poor and malnourished :rolleyes:
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Ironically, this does seem to be a high-tech version of what can be accomplished now with a compost pile and a garden. We turn our dead leaves into tomatoes.
 
With the help of earthworms et al which along with other odd protein sources may be in some our futures.

Insects could be the planet's next food source... even if that gives you the creeps
A festival next month in London aims to take the yuck factor out of eating bugs and promote the environmental benefits
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2013/mar/02/insects-next-food-source

We'll need a huge variety of approaches to get to sustainable.
 
Giraffe107 said:
Have you considered that this breakthrough isn't targetted at those who already have access to too much food, but rather those who are poor and malnourished :rolleyes:
Click to expand...

Problem is, as I understand it those conditions aren't the result of production, but of politics. We produce enough food, we simply can't (or don't) get it where it needs to go. I'm certainly no expert, and would love to hear from those who know more on the topic, but a quick look at the Wiki page shows that food production per capita is actually increasing, which can only mean that we have enough food to feed everyone if we'd get it to the people who need it.

I CAN see this technology being very useful in areas that are inhospitable to plants normally considered edible. Cellulose is a component of plant cell walls, so all plants have it. Find some plant that grows quickly and easily and you've got food, regardless of the soil type. Or convert the cellulose to fuel and export it in exchange for food--let's face it, the Middle East would be irrelevant if it weren't for their capacity for fuel production.
 
Myriad said:
Here's the abstract: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/04/12/1302420110

Here's a thorough news article: http://www.vtnews.vt.edu/articles/2013/04/041613-cals-zhangstarch.html

This looks really good. If it holds up, it's by far the most important news I've seen in a long time, easily dwarfing what happened in Boston a few days ago. (Not that this thread will ever get a tenth as many posts, though.)

There's no thermodynamic reason why the energy-in/energy-out balance cannot be very favorable. Cellulose has almost the same chemical energy as starch. And the authors claim that the process doesn't require heat or energetic chemical reagents, just reusable catalysts derived from biological sources.

Even cows and pigs can't eat dead leaves. I remove several tons of those from my yard every year. (Dead leaves, not cows and pigs.) If I could shove them into a hopper and convert them to pasta and bioethanol instead, it would be nearly as good as having a goddamned Mr. Fusion.

Now, it's not quite there yet: the starch being produced is amylose, which is not broken down in the human digestive system and is therefore not a source of caloric nutrition, though it can be useful as "dietary fiber," which we used to call "roughage."

As for the glucose portion of the output, the device needed to turn glucose into ethanol is, I believe, called a "still" and has its own inefficiencies, but glucose itself is also food in a pinch.

Respectfully,
Myriad
Click to expand...

Strictly speaking, a still doesn't turn glucose into ethanol. That happens in the fermentation vessel. The still concentrates the ethanol, and is necessary if you want to use the ethanol for fuel, but optional if you want to use the ethanol for drinking
 
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