New York City, February 8, 2006

The Australian branch of Epoch Times, in the paper’s New York City
printing, wrote October 10, 2005: “Hybrid Grass May Be ‘Ideal” Green
Fuel Source.” I am bringing it up now because of the President’s
mention of Grasses in the State of the Union speech.

The article deals with work by Professor Stephen Long of the
University of Illinois on a Japanese sugar-cane-like bamboo - the Giant
Miscanthus.

The plant is easy to grow. It needs little water or fertilizer and
grows about nine feet per year and reaches 12 feet in heights. It
outgrows weeds and is unaffected by most pests and diseases. It
produces 30 tons of biomass - dry weight - per acre per year. It is
grown in untilled ground which allows native wildlife to thrive in its
leafy canopy and surrounding undisturbed soil.

Miscanthus loses its leaves in winter and the stalks can be harvested
in early spring and used for burning like coal. Now, the amount of CO2
produced from the burning biomass is equal to the carbon that was
absorbed from the atmosphere by the growing plant - so there is net
zero emission of CO2 into the environment. It is thus very different
from coal which is old fossilized biomass and when one burns coal, one
takes carbon that was deposited underground millions of years ago and
brings it practically irreversibly into the atmosphere. We say
irreversibly because it would take millions of years to reverse the
process.

What we described here is the use of biomass grass for electricity or
heating - these are very clear, simple and known technologies - one
burns coal, one burns wood, one burns grass. What the President had in
mind was the making of liquid fuels from these grasses. This is not a
simple process like burning - this requires enzymatic or acid brake-up
of chemical bonds or the brake-up of the cellulose chains in these
materials. This technology will take years to perfect. So the bottom
line is that burning grass as if it were young coal can be done right
now, what the president talked about will be possible eventually, but
it is not yet an off-the-shelf technology.