Everyone from leading Silicon Valley venture capitalists to former President Bush is touting fuels created from biomass as a replacement for petroleum. But new technologies are needed to make this vision economically and environmentally feasible.
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ALL SPECIAL REPORTS
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- The Price of Biofuels
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Making ethanol from corn is expensive. Better biofuels are years away from the gas tank. Farmers are reluctant to change their practices. But do we really have any alternative to biofuels?
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- Hydrogen from Algae
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Genetically modified algae could be efficient producers of hydrogen and biofuels.
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- Creating Ethanol from Trash
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Researchers find a way to make liquid fuels from waste cheaply and without the pollution produced by earlier methods.
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- BP's Bet on Butanol
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Forget ethanol: it's hard to transport and gives bad mileage per gallon. Another alcohol, butanol, is a much better renewable fuel, says the president of BP Biofuels.
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- Oil from Wood
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Startup Kior has developed a process for creating "biocrude" directly from biomass.
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- A Better Biofuel
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A California biotech company is engineering microbes to produce cheap biofuels that could outcompete ethanol.
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- Cellulosic Biofuels
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Gregory Stephanopoulos explains challenges in converting biomass to biofuels.
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- Ethanol's Forecast
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Rain and floods in the corn-growing Midwest could drive up the costs of producing the biofuel.
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Massachusetts Institute of Technology
