However, as a fuel source this doesn’t look very promising to me. As a forest management or soil remediation tool, great. Ethanol, regardless of it’s source is not a optimal fuel. True it can be used to run engines that are designed for alcohol but when mixed with gasoline it is causing damage to engines, especially small engines. Considering the “energy gain”, only about 15%, it’s not a great contributor to our liquid fuel needs.

To my way of thinking, based on a lot of research, I see oil from algae as the only practical replacement for fossil oil. It too can be grown on scrub land (in photobioreactors, fancy name for a green houses) and has features that ethanol lacks. It is sustainable. Scalable. Carbon neutral. A drop in fuel for our present refinery system. After the oil is extracted the remaining material has a multitude of uses. The list goes on.