Japan brewer pursues 'Monster Cane' ethanol dream

[jpak]

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa001&articleID=E2C9CD9303B5C85296B84213935F37FD

IE ISLAND, Japan (Reuters) - It is three meters tall and productive even in poor soil, it holds up in droughts and typhoons, and it yields twice as many stems as most sugarcane. No wonder they call it "Monster Cane."

This new variety of sugarcane, named for its size as much as its vigor, is grown on a test field on the tiny island of Ie in Japan's southernmost prefecture of Okinawa.

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Asahi estimates the yield of the new sugarcane at 37.4 tonnes per hectare excluding moisture, which can be processed into 7.1 tons of sugar, 4.3 kiloliters of ethanol and 24 tons of bagasse.

This compares with the yield of a conventional cane type at 17.4 tons per hectare, sugar output at 6.9 tons, ethanol production at 1.4 kiloliters and bagasse volume at 7.8 tonnes, which is too small to produce sufficient energy for a processing plant.

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[mainegreen]

1. I wonder what the soil depletion rates are for that?

Not that it's a bad thing, that plant, but generally large plots of a single GE plant engineered to grow like crazy tends to screw with the soil. You'd have to seriously enforce crop rotation and/or other proper farming methods with plants like that or I'd imagine you'd have yourself a nice rocky 'desert' in no time.

[hunter]

2. Oil palms produce 2400 litres of fuel per acre.

Sugar and palm oil production is very destructive to the natural environment.

I always see these sorts of stories as bad news.