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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
The efficient, low-water process could also help produce ethanol for hand sanitiser, which is in high demand during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In an article published this week in the Journal of Cleaner Production, University of Sydney agronomist Associate Professor Daniel Tan with international and Australian colleagues have analysed the potential to produce bioethanol (biofuel) from the agave plant, a high-sugar succulent widely grown in Mexico to make the alcoholic drink tequila.
The agave plant is now being grown as a biofuel source on the Atherton Tablelands in Far North Queensland by MSF Sugar, and it promises some significant advantages over existing sources of bioethanol such as sugarcane and corn, Associate Professor Tan said.
"Agave is an environmentally friendly crop that we can grow to produce ethanol-based fuels and healthcare products," said Associate Professor Tan from the Sydney Institute of Agriculture.
"It can grow in semi-arid areas without irrigation; and it does not compete with food crops or put demands on limited water and fertiliser supplies. Agave is heat and drought tolerant and can survive Australia's hot summers."
-- submitted from IRC
Xiaoyu Yan, Kendall R. Corbin, Rachel A. Burton, Daniel K.Y. Tan. Agave: A promising feedstock for biofuels in the water-energy-food-environment (WEFE) nexus. Journal of Cleaner Production, 2020; 261: 121283 DOI: 10.1016/j.jclepro.2020.121283
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 02 2020, @03:15PM (7 children)
You'll get a lot more sugar and thus ethanol from traditional crops.
If Australia can't grow these, it should just import the ethanol from places that can do it efficiently. Australia is not blessed with tons of farmland.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by dwilson on Thursday April 02 2020, @03:46PM (6 children)
Having skimmed an article (from another website, possibly not the same one linked in the summery here) about this, agave yields roughly 30% less ethanol-per-hectare than sugarcane. On the face of it, that blows the 'more efficient' claim right out of the water.
On the subject of water, and as you noted, Australia doesn't have a lot of it, or the decent farmland it enables. Pissing away what little they do have on irrigating a fuel crop would be pretty dumb, so if agave can grow there without irrigation, it does make a sort of sense to develop harvesting technology and make a go of it.
Becoming self-sufficient in fuel production and getting away from a requirement to import it will do wonders for their foreign policy options, along with the knock-on benefits for the rest of us once the technology is mature and starts being exported.
- D
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 02 2020, @05:15PM (1 child)
I took a vacation to Brazil in the 1980s. The streets had a slightly sweet odor rather than the usual exhaust odor. That is because the automobiles, in the name of energy independence, ran on domestically produce ethanol rather than gasoline. Brazil has a large tropical region that is suited to growing sugar cane, the only crop that even barely makes sense as a source of ethanol fuel. I believe this initiative was started after the 1970s OPEC led fuel shocks. Well, not many years after I witnessed their transportation miracle, gasoline got cheaper and Brazil started its transition back to gasoline.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 02 2020, @05:23PM
I will add that Brazil is a major oil producer, and its production went sharply upward in the 1980s and is much higher today. So the ethanol as a fuel source didn't make sense anymore.
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Friday April 03 2020, @01:07AM (3 children)
The water requirements for the arid-adapted agave are significantly smaller than tropical sugar cane; 10 inches of water per year vs. 50 inches.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 03 2020, @02:32AM
It's not just the amount, it's also when. As a desert plant agave would be a lot more tolerant of nothing for most of the year then 10 inches of rain in a week.
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Saturday April 04 2020, @01:39AM (1 child)
better than trying to grow cotton [timalderman.com]
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Saturday April 04 2020, @04:19PM
If ever a plant needed to be re-engineered from the ground up, it's cotton. From a sustainability perspective it's an absolute shitshow.