Cabarrus Cheap Seats

I get a number of links from y’all and when I run across in my trolling about the Internet that I’ve been trying to find a way to include them without dominating the discussion. So, I’ve broken down the links into several categories and will be sharing them throughout the week every week depending on the discussion.

Being a geek, I’m constantly running across links to share that represent some technological shift.  So, from time to time, I’ll share the better ones.  Here’s this week’s

It was a little more than a century ago that when folks were looking for salt would run into this viscous black substance that had little apparent use…now, oil makes the world go ’round.  Today, there are two approaches to make a modern-day nuance into something useful.

First, from EcoGeek - using Kudzu in carbohydrate-based ethanol production:

Researchers at the University of Toronto and the US Department of Agriculture are taking a close look at kudzu, a native plant of Asia that can grow more than 6.5 feet a week and is nearly impossible to get rid of. The team examined the amount of carbohydrate in the plant – the part that gets turned into ethanol – at different times of year in different parts of the plant. They found the root carries over 2/3 of the carbs by weight, and they estimate kudzu could produce 2.2 to 5.3 tons of carbs per acre. This translates to 270 gallons of ethanol per acre, comparable to the ethanol yield of corn - which isn’t saying much considering corn is on the low end of the energy yield spectrum.

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The next article deals with a more advanced method - cellousoic ethanol - to leave no part of the plant unused.  Also, it’s not a study - it’s a pilot in Tennessee

o what does Kudzu have to do with ethanol? Simply, due to the starch (sugar) content, kudzu can be used to replace corn to make ethanol. Will kudzu take the place of food ingredients being used to make ethanol? A resounding “Yes!” is stated by Mr. Doug Mizell, co-founder of Agro* Gas Industries in Cleveland, Tennessee. Mizell and company co-founder, Tom Monahan, have dubbed the kudzu-based-ethanol, “Kudzunol.” Kudzu is an obvious resource: “There’s 7.2 million acres of kudzu in the south that’s absolutely good to no one,” said Mizell. “It grows a foot a day, 60 feet a season and can be harvested twice a year and not even hurt the stand.”

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