Stuff You Should Know - How Grassoline Works

Episode Date: April 17, 2008

Could switch grass become the car fuel of the future? Learn more about alternative fuel in this HowStuffWorks podcast. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Flooring contractors agree. When looking for the best to care for hardwood floors, use Bona Hardwood Floor Cleaner. The residue-free, fast drying solution is specially designed for hardwood floors, delivering the safe and effective clean you trust. Bona Hardwood Floor Cleaner is available at most retailers where floor cleaning products are sold and on Amazon. Also available for your other hard surface floors like Stone, Tile, Laminate, Vinyl, and LVT. For cleaning tips and exclusive offers, visit Bona.com slash Bona Clean. The War on Drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The cops, are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call,

like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid work. Be sure to listen to the War on Drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready, are you? Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. You're getting smarter. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. I'm a staff writer here at HowStuffWorks.com and with me today is my trusty editor, Chris Palette. Chris and I don't always see eye to eye on what should or shouldn't go into the article, but I can tell you one that we both agree on and

find fascinating. It's an article that I wrote and he edited called Can We Fuel Cars With Grass? So Chris, why don't you tell the folks about this article and what it says? Well, basically, switchgrass is one of the feedstocks for a biofuel. And of course, that's something that pops up in the news all the time now is ethanol or biodiesel. But instead of using corn, which is something, of course, that people and animals eat, or sugarcane... Which is delicious. Oh, yes. Yes, absolutely. But very hard to find in the continental U.S. We can use switchgrass, which is a great source of cellulose, which is the substance I believe

you told me that cell walls are made up of. And basically, what they do is they break it down and make it into a fuel, just like you refine oil into gasoline. Except you can't find fossil fuels just anywhere where you're possibly approaching peak oil, as you mentioned in another one of your articles. And so this is something that might be grown all over the world and lots that aren't good enough to grow crops on. It might be a really good solution. Well, not only that, switchgrass has the wonderful trait of being able to improve soil where it grows. So like you were saying, it grows in these marginal scrub lands that can't be used for farming anyway. And it actually improves the soil. So you grow some switchgrass in an area for about a dozen

years. And next thing you know, PrestoChangio, that's arable farmland now. So it would definitely help Africa out quite a bit, which is one of the regions where it can grow wild, too. So tell us what switchgrass is specifically. Well, switchgrass is, as its name suggests, a grass. It's not particularly pleasant to look at. It's, you know, I think some people consider it invasive and more like a weed than anything else. Yes, farmers especially. Yeah. And it's, I don't know, can I, I didn't even find this out. Do animals eat switchgrass? Or is it just something that's irritating to farmers? I think it's generally irritating. It's used in some circumstances as an ornamental grass. Some types are. But I think ultimately it was clearly put on

the earth here to be used as cellulosic ethanol. Well, I suppose that's, it's one interpretation of it. It'll be interesting to see what happens with it because right now it's very expensive to refine switchgrass into cellulosic ethanol. And of course, every proponent of every different biofuel has a reason why we should be using theirs. But one thing, Josh, that I found out recently since we published the article is that converting fields to be used for biofuels, for example, to grow soy or corn or sugarcane or palm or palm, can actually be more trouble because in the conversion process it can release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. I read an article in The New Scientist that said 10,000 square meters of Brazilian rainforests converting that over to

grow biofuel stock crops, that would actually release 700,000 kilograms of carbon dioxide, which is amazing. You have to use biofuels for years, hundreds of years in some cases, to recoup the carbon debt that you do by converting it. So it seems like switchgrass might be a great solution to that problem. Switchgrass is an excellent solution, but I don't think it's the only solution. You can't grow switchgrass in Indonesia. You can grow palm in Indonesia and make oil from it. And sure, there's a carbon debt, and that is something clearly that we're trying to get around is to put any more carbon or any other greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere. But I think even more than even maybe more important than climate change is

war and regional autonomy. Imagine if Indonesia didn't have to import any oil from anywhere else. They were energy self-sufficient. Imagine if the U.S. were energy self-sufficient. How much more peaceful would the world be, do you think, Chris, if we all grew our own energy supply? That's true. It makes regions more stable. There are fewer things to have political conflicts over. Sure. And I'm not pointing fingers, but wars are fought over oil. Oh, sure. And all sorts of other resources. Well, thanks for joining us this week. You can read Can We Fuel Cars with Grass on HowStuffWorks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. Let us know what you think. Send an email to podcast at howstuffworks.com.

The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The cops, are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call, like what we would call a jackmove, or being robbed. They call civil asset for it. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Here we go.