Can Waste from US Paper Mills Help Supply Nations Energy Needs?
Will wood help fill US energy needs? By John K. Borchardt | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor Friday, 05/06/05 Forget corn processing. Don’t wait for switch grass. The real key to producing enough ethanol for America’s cars and trucks this century is wood. That’s the contention of researchers at the State University of New York (SUNY). By revamping the way paper is made, they’ve found an economical way to extract important energy-rich sugars from the trees and then convert these sugars into ethanol, a gasoline additive, and other useful chemicals. It’s a process the researchers call a biorefinery. Installed at the nation’s paper mills, biorefineries could produce 2.4 billion gallons of ethanol a year, they estimate, or 80 percent of the nation’s projected need this year. “We know our sources of fossil fuel aren’t going to last forever,” says Thomas Amidon, a professor at SUNY’s College of Environmental Science and Forestry. “Biorefineries allow us to substitute a sustainab
