Greenbiz.com reports that Shell and Virent are partnering for 5 years to develop a bio-gasoline that can be run through traditional petro-gasoline engines. Their biggest concern is to come up with an alternative that won’t contribute to deforestation or create increased food prices. Good Thinking!

In recent months, there has been a lot of heat on ethanol and other alternative fuels that use food stocks as energy sourcing because of the impending rise in food prices if a portion of our harvests go to running cars rather than feeding people. More over, based upon the land needed already, there are concerns that the need for more corn fields, for example, would drive more deforestation, effectively nullifying the benefit of moving away from petrol. We agree, we shouldn’t just trade one evil for another.

“The partnership will use Virent’s BioForming technology to convert plant sugars into hydrocarbon molecules similar to those created in conventional petroleum refineries. Instead of fermenting the sugars into ethanol and distilled, the molecules have higher energy content than ethanol and can be blended to make conventional gasoline or mixed with gasoline containing ethanol.”

One of the major benefits here is that the solution uses almost all of the existing infrastructure that is in place today. We can use our same cars, pump from our existing fuel stations… not a bad platform to start from.

We would like to see more research going into using recycled fuels as opposed to generating new sources of energy to drive our cars, buses and trains. With the amount of waste we create and the successes we have had in recycling glass, aluminum and plastics we hope there is a mass scale second hand solution. Until then, we will ride the WVO Barefaced Mobile.

See the Greenbiz article here.