Poplar Trees Hold Promise For Fuel
With gasoline approaching $4.50 a gallon, Washington State University researcher Jon Johnson finds himself in a scramble to extract ethanol from fast-growing poplar trees.
It's a new field in the world of business and industry, but the search for fuel from hybrid poplars is far from new to Johnson, 55, of Puyallup. He has been breeding hybrid poplars as feedstock for paper mills and sawmills and looking at their fuel potential since the mid-1970s, when the first gasoline crisis hit the United States and sparked a biofuel movement.
The original biofuel boom was interrupted when the gasoline crisis eased 30 years ago. Now the search has rebounded.
Ethanol is useful as a fuel additive. E10, which is 10 percent ethanol and 90 percent gasoline, is available all over the United States and runs in any gasoline engine. E85, a blend of 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline, is available mainly in corn-producing states. E85 can be used as a substitute for gasoline in vehicles that have been modified to use this biofuel.
Corn has become the feedstock of choice for ethanol makers. Corn is already widely available, and extracting ethanol from grain is much easier than from fiber in trees or grasses. But there is a backlash. Despite growing acceptance of ethanol, some question whether the corn is needed more for food than for fuel.
So Johnson's 30 years of patient research on fuel from poplars is emerging for practical use.
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