Most of the materials needed to sustain our modern daily living such as fuels, pharmaceuticals, and other commodity materials, come from non-renewable resources. Since they are non-renewable, these materials would be more costly and more difficult to acquire over time as their supplies diminish. A good example of these non-renewable resources is petroleum, from which we get fuels that meet our demand for energy.
To help create a truly renewable alternative to petroleum, Michelle O’Malley, a professor of chemical engineering at UC Santa Barbara, has turned to one of the most abundant materials on Earth: the non-food parts of plants — stems, roots, inedible leaves — that would generally be regarded as waste. And with a $2.25 million award from the U.S. Department of Energy, O’Malley’s research group, along with collaborators at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), are poised to advance the knowledge of and technology for advanced biofuels.
“We are extremely grateful to the Department of Energy for making this award, which will fund an ambitious, high-risk/high-reward research collaboration between UC Santa Barbara and PNNL to image microbial processes that are critical for waste-to-fuel production,” O’Malley said. “There is a critical need to develop new methods to manufacture chemicals, fuels and commodity chemicals from renewable resources.”
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You're right, of course, but it's expensive to develop something, and the benefit of doing so will be far in the future. In the meantime, everyone's got to eat today - so off to work we go in a car that burns fossil fuel, live/work in a building that is heated/cooled by energy (partly/mostly depending on where you are) derived from fossil fuel, and so on.
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I never understood why fossile fuel is still so widely used. From a chemist's point of view oil is such a versatile ressource. For me burning fossile fuel is simply like heating a house by burning lego bricks. (Which is possible, as ABS-plastic the lego bricks ar made from is not self-extinguishing.) It is common knowledge that fossile fuel is limited an one day we will have to develop methods to replace it by renewable ressources. Why not starting now to massively develop alternative and renewable energy sources, as we will have to do it anyway in near future?
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