No, really. But not soon.

Ethanol is not great. Even Al Gore had to eventually concede he had made a mistake in promoting it for almost two decades once it became common knowledge that driving food prices up for a costly, energy-negative alternative to gasoline that didn't improve the environment was a bad idea. . .

Wrong. Again. And not for the last time. Isn't his teflon getting a little thin by now?

Researchers are tinkering up what seem to be Goldberg (Robinson?) contraptions to keep the faith.

Cows, with help from bacteria, convert plant fibers, called cellulose, into energy, but this is a big, expensive step for biofuel production. In the commercial biofuel industry, only the kernels of corn plants can be used to make ethanol, but this new discovery would allow the entire corn plant to be used – so more fuel can be produced with less cost. . .

“The fact that we can take a gene that makes an enzyme in the stomach of a cow and put it into a plant cell means that we can convert what was junk before into biofuel,” . . .

Turning plant fibers into sugar requires three enzymes. The new variety of corn created for biofuel production, called Spartan Corn III, builds on Sticklen’s earlier corn versions by containing all three necessary enzymes. . .

If the cell produced the enzyme in the wrong place, then the plant cell would not be able to function, and, instead, it would digest itself. . .

One of the targets for the enzyme produced in Spartan Corn III is a special part of the plant cell, called the vacuole. The vacuole is a safe place to store the enzyme until the plant is harvested. The enzyme will collect in the vacuole with other cellular waste products

Because it is only in the vacuole of the green tissues of plant cells, the enzyme is only produced in the leaves and stalks of the plant, not in the seeds, roots or the pollen. It is only active when it is being used for biofuels because of being stored in the vacuole.

First of all, the leaves and stalks are not junk. They are good food for ruminants. In the day growers would turn cattle onto harvested fields to clean up such "junk", and get them hog fat in the process. Then they'd turn in the hogs following the cattle, and get them hog fat too. They'd end with with clean, manured fields ready for a next crop cycle.

There is some interesting research being done that is targeted to developing world ag where some of these older methods are being introduced or maintained. They are breeding varieties that have more nutritious leaves and stalks. Varieties grown for silage, where the whole plant is chopped and fermented, already do this, so it isn't all that hard.

I think that the world would benefit more from focusing on food production than on fuel production from crops. Other biofuels that use forest slash, urban green wastes and pond scum don't seem harmful, though even they might be better if they used integrated systems that sequestered carbon (as biochar) while producing some fuels or fertilizers from gasification.

Still, one can applaud the discoveries of researchers while declining to implement them on a large scale.