From "How the World Works Column" by Andrew Leonard at Salon.com (Original Article)
Domestic Bioenergy: Weaning Ourselves From Foreign Oil Addiction
Feb. 16, 2007 - At a press conference in San Francisco on Friday, listening to four distinguished scientists discuss ambitious plans to replace one-third of annual American gasoline consumption with biofuels, it was impossible not to imagine what would have happened if Tad Patzek, the Berkeley chemical engineering professor who is one of the nation's leading critics of biofuels, had been present. Nearly every assertion he made in a lecture I attended at Berkeley in October was directly contradicted.
There is enough marginal, unused agricultural land in the United States to generate the biomass necessary to reach the one-third goal without displacing food production, said Steven Chu, the Nobel physics prize winner who runs the Lawrence Berkeley Livermore Laboratory. And the laws of thermodynamics won't need to be broken -- there is more than enough energy hitting the earth every day as sunlight to supply all of humanity's energy needs. Ethanol produced via cellulosic technology, said CalTech biologist Mel Simon, who helped develop one of the key technologies employed in DNA sequencing, was just a handful of years away from being cost-competitive with conventional gasoline. The technical problems involved "are just an engineering problem," said Chris Somerville, a Stanford plant biologist who is considered a contender to be the director of the new Energy Biosciences Institute at Berkeley. Not only that, but we can actually increase the current biodiversity and fertility of farmland by correctly introducing new feed stocks into the industrial farming landscape, said Gerry Tuskan, the leader of the team that completed the sequencing of the poplar genome last year.
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