Converting Switchgrass to Biofuel Essay -- Biology Ethanol Alternative

ingress People need energy, its a fact. We need it for our cars, for our televisions and for our iPods. We need it on the whole the time, each day. The simple fact is though, we are running out. Carbon establish fuels are being used at an alarming rate every day. And every day our demand increases as our society becomes much and more reliant on technology.There is only so much oil colour in the world though and when that is gone we need to look for pick sources of energy. Sources like ethanol produced from Switchgrass.In 2004 an article was published on the induction of ethanol from catalystes made from switchgrass. The article was titled, Fermentation of Biomass-Generated Producer Gas to Ethanol.This article held produced several interesting results. First it demonstrated that producer gas could be generated from biomass (Switchgrass) and that the producer gas could be fermented to produce ethanol. Second the cells stopped increment but did not die. During this period of non-growth ethanol was produced. Third H2 utilization ceased and quartern cells began growing again if clean bottled gases were introduced following exposure to the producer gas (Datar, Shenkman, Cateni, Huhnke and Lewis 2004, p. 1.) Switchgrass Panicum virgatumWhy switchgrass? Thats the question of the hour. And to tell in that location truth in that location are a lot of reasons. Firstly and foremost is the fact that there are millions of dollars in government funding available. Secondly switchgrass is grown across the entire center of the united states in a variety of environments.Switchgrass is bodacious and adaptable, it grows large and fast, sometime reaching slightly over ten feet in height. As a bonus switchgrass also processes water very efficie... ...ide, 4.4% enthalpy Gas, and 4.2% Methane gas. The actual gasified switch grass however, did not have this organization and had some unknow tittle or molecules that was damaging to the cells.This unknown molecule or mol ecules could be oxygen, nitric oxide, or ammonia, all of which are known to negatively affect cells. This article was published in 2004 and, the follow up try out that addresses these impurities was conducted by the same people in 2005. In this experiment they found that the gas did in fact have many impurities and an abundant gas cleaning procedure needed to be implemented in order to effectively harvest ethanol from the bacteria P7. The molecule that was loosely responsible for disrupting the cell was nitric oxide. All in all it seems all told viable to use this biological process in order to retrace ethanol for wide spread use.