What challenges are being encountered in the production of biofuels?

Question

What impact could genetic engineering have on the issue?

Answer 1

To some extent, we've been making biofuels for millenia. It's possible for example, to fuel an engine with alcohol, and we've been fermenting and purifying that stuff from plants extracts for a long, long time.

The problem is that compared to gasoline, the kinds of energy that plants produce tend to be very, very weak. One kilogram of gasoline has 44.4 MJ of energy (that's megajoules, by the way... one MJ is about 100 dietary calories or enough to keep a 100-watt lightbulb burning for 2.7 hours). Alcohol, on the other hand, has 19.9 MJ/kg, and sugar has a paltry 1.6 MJ/kg.

Which means that even if we had a perfect way of turning sugar into gasoline, it would take almost 82 kg of sugar to make just 1 gallon of gasoline.

One advantage of biofuels is that you might turn things that would otherwise be waste - such as grass clippings and non-edible agricultural byproducts - into fuel. But given its poor efficiency, even if all farmland in the world was used to produce only biofuel it would have trouble meeting our current needs.

Here's a couple places where genetic engineering can enter the picture. If plants produced usable (or more easily convertable) fuels directly, we would approach much closer to that ideal (but still not too favourable) exchange of sugar for gasoline. Perhaps more significantly, if we can alter plants that grow in areas where we cannot grow crops - such as algae that could be grown in the oceans or tanks in the deserts - we wouldn't have to sacrifice ANY farmland to produce extra biofuel, which would be win-win.

Answer 2

Well, first of, biofuels are not that difficult to extract but can be extracted in very minute amounts. Hence, if you are to produce a yearly supply of biofuel for a modern country (in barrels), you are to |kill" lots of plants since these organisms are the major sources of biofuels.

In the case of genetic engineering, I think genetic engineers should come up with a genetically modified organism which can produce more essential oils vital in the production of biofuels.