Corn Gene Doubling Produces Giant Biomass

This breakthrough is good news as it allows a biomass focused growing regime in the Corn Belt. They do not share any expected yield as this is simply too new. Combined with the report today on the advance on using xylose, we see the ingredient for an emergent corn cellulose to biofuel industry that will have a low producer cost base and ample developed land to grow on.

We have never focused on maximizing cellulose production ever and this is a good stert. Other crops like hemp and tobacco should be just as amenable.

There is obviously still plenty of work to do in this field but I am now encouraged that the cost in land and space will be completely bearable. Worst case scenarios were making the ethanol fuel replacement model look impossible. We now are seeing that full biomass conversion to ethanol or perhaps biobutanol will be technically feasible. That means that cost structures and operation scales will be stable everywhere.

Once that is properly settled, then it should be one additional step to develop wood waste as a feedstock also. This would permit the proper use of wood management methods to be possible economically employed in a way that begins to maximize the tree size and quality over the decades. All our hardwood forests can become fully managed and a large section of the boreal forest also as the cattail trade expands into the forest.

Doubling A Gene In Corn Results In Giant Biomass

by Staff Writers
Champaign IL (SPX) Mar 04, 2009

http://www.biofueldaily.com/reports/Doubling_A_Gene_In_Corn_Results_In_Giant_Biomass_999.html

University of Illinois plant geneticist Stephen Moose has developed a corn plant with enormous potential for biomass, literally. It yields corn that would make good silage, Moose said, due to a greater number of leaves and larger stalk, which could also make it a good energy crop.

The gene known as Glossy 15 was originally described for its role in giving corn seedlings a waxy coating that acts like a sun screen for the young plant.

Without Glossy 15, seedling leaves instead appear shiny and glossy in sunlight. Further studies have shown that the main function of Glossy15 is to slow down shoot maturation.

Moose wondered what would happen if they turned up the action of this gene. "What happens is that you get bigger plants, possibly because they're more sensitive to the longer days of summer. We put a corn gene back in the corn and increased its activity. So, it makes the plant slow down and gets much bigger at the end of the season."

The ears of corn have fewer seeds compared to the normal corn plant and could be a good feed for livestock. "Although there is less grain there is more sugar in the stalks, so we know the animal can eat it and they'll probably like it." This type of corn plant may fit the grass-fed beef standard, Moose said.

"The first time I did this, I thought, well, maybe the seeds just didn't get pollinated very well, so I hand pollinated these ears to make sure. I found that just like the shoot, seed development is also slower and they just don't make it all the way to the end with a plump kernel," Moose said.

He explained that the energy to make the seed goes instead into the stalk and leaves. "We had been working with this gene for awhile. We thought there would be more wax on the leaves and there was. But we also got this other benefit, that it's a lot bigger."

Moose tested his hypothesis with other corn lines and the effect was the same. "We essentially can make any corn variety bigger with this gene. And it can be done in one cross and we know exactly which gene does it."

He noted that if you put too much of the Glossy 15 gene in, it slows down the growth too much and the frost kills the plant before it can grow.

One advantage to growing sugar corn for biomass rather than switchgrass or miscanthus is that sugar corn is an annual. Moose said that if it would attract a pest or develop a disease, farmers could rotate a different crop the next year.

Moose said that sugar corn might make a good transition crop.

"We think it might take off as a livestock feed, because it's immediate," Moose said. "This would be most useful for on-farm feeding. So a farmer who has 50 steers, could grow this and use the corn as feed and sell the stalks and sugar. It could be an alternative silage, because it has a longer harvest window than regular silage."

For this sugar corn plant to become commercialized, it would have to get government approval, but Moose said that this is about as safe a gene as you can get. "It's a gene that's already in the corn - all we did was to put an extra copy in that amps it up."

Indian Slave Trade

Continuing my reading of Native Roots has opened up another shocker that is certainly a surprise to my readers as well. Settlement of the Atlantic coast was substantially supported by slave trading of American Indians every bit as egregious as that of the African trade. The coastal tribes were depopulated and shipped south into the sugar plantations of the Caribbean from the beginning. Early wars of colonial aggression were ultimately slave raids. It only died down perhaps as superior African slaves took over the market.

This was the nature of the seventeenth century Atlantic economy. That it has been well hidden from our schoolbooks and our historical understanding is an understatement. It also explains the demographic decline of the Eastern Indian Tribes a lot better than the hand wave of disease. The run of an epidemic was always brief and pretty final. Yet healthy tribes operated in the East into the nineteenth century and their final expulsion.

They did not die out slowly. The dying took place often long before Europeans even showed up and what the colonists were dealing with were those who had survived the worst and were actually on equal terms in disease resistance. Recall that Europeans got decimated by smallpox all through this era. And warfare claims only young men, because the women are taken into slavery at worst.

And there is our answer. The slave trade sold the men at least into the Caribbean for hard labour. More likely the women served as slaves on the coast because they were less likely able to escape. Their offspring would be predominantly hybrid stock with the associated vigor and the ready ability to step outside their visible racial designation.

Was this deliberate? Of course it was. You only have to read the treatment practiced on the Indians in California long since institutionalized to understand that the preferred offspring of an enslaved people were a hybrid stock. It is just that it is not discussed or committed to paper in contemporary sources, and so we have been allowed to forget what really happened over and over again.

It is difficult to piece the history of tens of millions of human beings lost to history and touched on by a mere handful of observers, who at best saw often only a village or two. To imagine from that a civilization of millions is to interpret modern North America from a brief visit to a Newfoundland out port. Archeology is slowly showing us a bit of the true histories of the Americas and allowing us to accept that our contact interrupted the lives of tens of millions.

Stevia FDA Approval

This business item is something that I stumbled into and thought that I should share it with you. This is the beginning of the stevia market in the USA. When I first investigated stevia, it was argued that the FDA was protecting the sugar trade. That was likely true.

I found it outrageous that a completely proven natural sweetener, clearly superior to all synthetics was been held off the market.

It was grown in England during the second war, and amazingly it holds a 5% market share in Japan. That is not small potatoes.

A really good application that I would like to see is a glucose beverage sweetened with it. Glucose is a sugar that goes directly into the bloodstream with minimal impact on other digestive processes. Its weakness is a modest sweetness compared to sugar. This would be a superior way to ingest your coke if stevia becomes the sweetness source.

In any case, it has long been understood that we are dangerously addicted to far too much sugar in our diets. Get rid of it and our sensitivity will reset at a much lower level.

If you want to ruin your day, count the number of cups of sweetened drinks that you have every day. Then estimate the spoons of sugar used. Then spoon a like amount into a cup and look at it. Would you eat it?

I did that to my coffee habit fifteen years ago and that was the end of that.



New drinks review: stevia gaining ground as the new sweetener of choice
Tue. January 20, 2009; Posted: 06:15 AM

Jan 20, 2009 (Datamonitor via COMTEX) The natural sweetener stevia has gained much attention in recent weeks after the US Food and Drug Administration approved the sweetener for use in foodstuffs. Following the approval, a number of manufacturers have introduced new stevia products, including Coca Cola and PepsiCo. As a result, the product can be expected to gain further exposure in 2009.

PepsiCo has launched the SoBe Lifewater Vitamin Enhanced Water beverage, a new line of soft drinks which contains an extract of the stevia leaf called PureVia, in the US. The extract is said to provide a sweet taste but without the calories of sugar, and is promoted on the fact that it is a natural product, unlike other available sugar substitutes. Now that stevia has official approval, PepsiCo is likely to include it in a rising number of new products.

PepsiCo rival Coca Cola has also released a new drink that contains an extract of stevia leaf in the US. Sprite Green Naturally Sweetened Soda contains a stevia leaf extract called Truvia. However, while the new SoBe line is said to contain no calories, Sprite Green is said to contain 50 calories per 8.5-ounce serving which, according to the company, is 50% fewer calories than regular soda.

Staying with the health theme, Javalution Coffee has launched the JavaFit Ready to Drink Latte, a line of functional, ready-to-drink coffee beverages, in the US. The line includes Diet Plus, Extreme, Focus and Immune varieties, which each claim to have a functional benefit. The Diet Plus variety, for example, is described as a lower calorie, lower fat, high powered blend that can help to suppress the appetite and support weight loss programs. Such products could help to reposition coffee, reversing its somewhat negative image to present it as a healthier beverage.

Meanwhile, Rubyy has launched an energy drink in the US under its company name. This is a premium style of energy drink that is presented in a distinctive black aluminum bottle. The drink is available in an orange flavor which contains the juice of various orange varieties including blood oranges, tangerines and Valencia oranges. The company claims that this provides the beverage with a superior taste. The energy drinks market is currently saturated with products, but this high-end launch could stand out from the crowd.

Over in Europe, more specifically Spain, Finland, Portugal, France, Italy, and Norway, PepsiCo is capitalizing on the popularity of mojito beverages with the launch of Pepsi Mojito. The mojito is a blend of mint and lime which has traditionally been used in alcoholic drinks. This version pairs lime and mint in a cola, in both diet and non-diet varieties, showing that the mojito flavor is moving into the soft drinks market.

Finally, a recent Japanese launch claims to feature a new type of super carrot. Ito En has introduced Ito En Kokusan 100 Yasai, a vegetable juice drink that is made with 12 types of selected vegetables. However, helping it to stand out from the crowd is the fact that the "connoisseur" carrots used in the drink are said to contain 1.5 times as much beta-carotene as normal carrots. The carrots are processed through the Natural Sweet Method, which is said to enhance the sweetness of carrots without using sugar or salt. This new drink appears to be a first in the juice market.

http://www.datamonitor.com

Bill Drake on Tobacco as Ethanol Feedsock

Bill Drake posted this recently and he has assembled a detailed report on his website at:

http://home.ktc.com/bdrake/tbe3.html

The quoted figures apply to a tightly seeded field without any rows for picking access. The huge tonnages appear to be a result of multiple harvesting with rapid intervening growth.

This produced tonnage likely surpasses that of potential hemp volume and is surely more amenable to later processing.

The sugar and starch content is surprising. What we have is a crop that can produce ethanol easily, be refined for protein and whose cellulose byproduct will be easy to use for additional processing because of the low lignin content. We have already identified cattails for wetland exploitation and now we have tobacco as a crop resource on marginal croplands in particular.

We have already commented on the viability of hemp.

Both these plants suffer from been politically incorrect and proper research and recognition has been hampered accordingly. This will be over come, but it will take time and will lack enthusiastic support for some time.

We only have to look at the strides been made by biochar into media consciousness over the past year and a half since I began talking about it. It is now popping up in strange but very normal places as accepted knowledge.

This had a lot to do with the recent article in National Geographic.

No one s pushing the use of tobacco yet while there is a small effort on promoting hemp.

Corn remains the best biomass producer for pure biochar production, simply because of mass and separate starch production which pays for it. Hemp has value for the fiber, but that negates any value as a biochar source. Tobacco has the same problem and producing a crop purely for biochar is unlikely to ever be popular.

Producing tobacco as a source of feedstock for ethanol production appears to be very competitive. The lack of lignin will make even the cellulose fraction more easily available as an ethanol feedstock.

This is leading to a need to produce ethanol production hardware for operating farm. This will be in the form of digesters and tankage and separation gear scaled to handle the tonnages. One hundred and fifty wet tons per acre from a hundred acres turns into a weekly throughput of three hundred tons. That is a lot of material and storage to accommodate. A small operation could work around twenty acres easily and scale their operation on sixty tons per week.

It is important to do the first stage of production on the farm and sell either brew at the farm gate or an upgraded liquor using membranes if possible. It could even be collected through a pipeline and concentrated at a large processing plant for final finishing.

An Uninvestigated Biomass Resource

Posted on: October 5th, 2008 by biomasstobacco

Would you be interested in knowing about a previously uninvestigated biomass energy resource with extraordinary potential well beyond any plant currently being investigated?

I do understand that the claim of a major crop plant that has never been investigated for its bioenergy potential doesn’t make much sense, but after reading my web page, please search the ORNL database or any other bioenergy database you like – you will find not a mention of this incredibly high potential resource.

For your information, this unknown bioenergy resource is ordinary tobacco, grown as biomass. Tobacco grown for biomass is completely different than tobacco grown for consumption, and while biomass tobacco has never been investigated for its energy potential, other than my own work, it may turn out to be the cost-effective, unsubsidized biomass resource that the industry has been seeking for so long.

Here are just a few of the relevant characteristics of this potential biomass game-changer:

1. Because of its vigorous coppicing behavior, multiple harvests of tobacco for biomass per season mean that producers can expect a seasonal biomass yield of between 100-300 Metric Tons/Acre of (150-180 MT/Acre has already been demonstrated in trials at North Carolina State University).

2. The dry weight yield of this tobacco biomass will be 10-20 tons per 100 tons green weight

3. Of this dry weight, approximately 20% will be sugars, or approximately 2-4 tons of sugars per 100 tons of green weight.

4. Another 10% or so will be starches, or about 1-2 tons of starch per 100 tons green weight.

5. About 20% of the dry weight will be mixed proteins, which break down into what is called Fraction 1 and Fraction 2 protein, or between 2-4 tons of pure protein per 100 tons of fresh, green weight. These are HUMAN FOOD-GRADE proteins, and can be recovered after energy is produced from the biomass.

7. Also, since tobacco is about 40% cellulose, dry weight equivalent, 100 tons green weight will yield between 4 & 8 tons of very low lignin, easily fermented or digested cellulose.

8. Finally, this biomass crop can be grown on marginal land unsuitable for food crops, and has a wider geographic range than either corn or sugar cane.

If you would like to read complete details on my proposal to utilize this previously uninvestigated bioresource please visit my non-commercial web page

http://home.ktc.com/bdrake/tbe3.html

Best wishes – Bill Drake

Ethanol from Sugar

Picked up the tail end of an interview with Richard Branson on Charlie rose last night in which the discussions turned to what options are available to us in terms of displacing some part of the oil trade. Richard came down quite strongly on the short term use of ethanol from sugar as a replacement fuel. His first suggestion was to immediately eliminate the import duties on sugar into the USA. This would immediately put all the sugar producing areas back into competition and encourage rapid expansion of supply. Follow this with a rapid build out of sugar based ethanol production and we will have created a major competitive transportation fuel source.

Importantly, the Brazilians have already shown us that it is very doable. A pleasant surprise was to discover that the residual bagasse makes a highly efficient power plant fuel. So we do not have to wait for a cellulose conversion technology to use the rest of the feedstock.

I do not think that it is possible to displace all of our fuel needs by the use of sugar based ethanol, but it is certainly possible to replace some and it can be done quickly. It also directly supports tropical populations throughout the world were sugar production has been deeply depressed for decades. This produces many social benefits.

We now live in a world in which a loss of a million barrels of oil production per day will not be easy to replace from other sources and this is now becoming visibly more precarious with each passing month. Having the equivalent of that production on tap as soon as possible from an alternative source would go a long way to giving us a little elbow room.

The real difficulty is that we simply do not have enough potential sugar cane fields to make a large difference in the long haul. Once oil production has slipped by a few million barrels we will quickly run out of sugar cane fields. At least the yield is apparently several times greater than corn which is a boon. It may be even possible to replace a serious fraction of fuel demand in this manner, although my instincts are suggesting that even several million barrels equivalent would be a remarkable feat. I have not ground through the calculations yet.

The hard reality is that the great oil crisis is upon us, and there are few available options open to us to cover the gap until other fuel sources are made to work. Producing sugar everywhere possible while employing millions is rather a good idea and will keep everyone busy while the problem really gets solved.

I also cannot say this more strongly. The decline in conventional global oil production is essentially under way but this is still hidden from public consciousness. It cannot be so for much longer. The replacements that are available need lead times that are normally not experienced in this industry which means when the storm hits, everyone will be caught flatfooted. It is tragic that we are simultaneously dealing with a grave credit crisis within the US banking system and by proxy the global financial system.

It would be a relief in these conditions if there was enough room through ethanol to hold us over.