November 4th, 2008
By John DeFore
Green Right Now
While biofuel proponents struggle with concerns that some of their favored technologies — like those turning corn into car fuel — literally take food out of the mouths of the poor in pursuit of fossil-fuel independence, scientists are pursuing alternatives that not only won’t interfere with the global food supply, but actually clean up after it.
A new study published in the Journal of Chemical Technology & Biotechnology claims that renewable bioethanol can be squeezed, not out of olives, but out of the seeds we spit out of them.
According to researchers from the Universities of Jaén and Granada in Spain,
polysaccharides in olive stones “can be broken down into sugar and then fermented to produce ethanol.” Their process involved pressure-cooking the pits, then adding enzymes to degrade them; so far, they’ve achieved yields of 5.7 kilograms of ethanol per 100 kg of pits.
That may not sound like much, but the study quotes an annual available supply of 4 million metric tons of the stuff — removed from olives being packed for table use or squeezed for olive oil — that until now has been treated as waste. What’s more, the pits are so compact they’re economical to ship for processing.
Researchers aren’t claiming olive waste alone will transform transportation, but they do suggest that “if similar principles were employed across all agricultural industries, energy gains would be significant.”
Copyright © 2008 Green Right Now | Distributed by Noofangle Media
