Scientists discover new way to convert corn waste to low-cost sugar for biofuel | Hacker News Reader

Scientists discover new way to convert corn waste to low-cost sugar for biofuel

news.wsu.edu

38 pointsgnabgib16 comments

The devil's always in the details.

I notice they use potassium hydroxide to treat this, and I seriously doubt merely in a catalytic capacity. That means that a lot of electrical input needs to be run into a chlor-alkali plant to make the KOH. If it's just a sprinkling, great. But is it?

Now if you're making moderately valued commodities like sugars or bioreagents, or perhaps even bioplastics, it might be cost-effective in spite of an electrical chlor-alkali input stream.

If you're making biofuels, however, this looks like corn-based ethanol or certain kinds of biodiesel, where there's lots of electrical and petrochemical energy inputs that conveniently get omitted when they tout how great for the environment and home-grown that biofuel energy is. Really hope they're not planning on going the same way with this set of discoveries.

Would this still be competitive price wise if corn in the USA was not so heavily subsidized? It only states in the article the end product would be competitive with imported low cost sugar.

Exactly, its only 'low-cost' because of these subsidies.

Farming in the first world wouldn’t exist without subsidies

  They calculated that, by offsetting the cost of production through byproduct uses or sales, the resulting sugar could be sold for as low as 28 cents per pound, making it competitive with low-cost imported sugar.

Not in the US. Americans pay double global sugar prices so as to protect the corn lobby.

Regardless, the economics could still be there if this is truly waste trash. The article did not mention how the cellulose is currently used. Animal feed? Mulch? Landfill? I guess there is somebody who pays something for access to the material.

Edit: mangled the phrasing

>Not in the US. Americans pay double global sugar prices so as to protect the corn lobby.

I thought it was the sugar lobby that wanted protectionist tariffs? What other situation do you have an industry lobbying to enact tariffs on their competitors?

The US Sugar Program (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Sugar_Program) was intended to prop up domestic sugar production. The explosion of corn syrup was probably unexpected which now competes vs global and domestic sugar.

Related technology developed in Australia with bagasse (sugar cane waste products) https://www.statedevelopment.qld.gov.au/news-and-events/turn...

This could be useful in India, where farmers prefer to just burn the biomass after a harvest, causing lots of air pollution in North Indian areas like Delhi, especially in winter.

That's also partially a labor issue too though, right? If the farmers had the ability to clear those fields manually, I would like to think they'd do that. They aren't quite generating substantial enough revenue now, and I highly highly doubt BioFuelCo will pay farmers fairly for the waste.

If BiofuelCo can clear those fields rapidly with some tech they developed, then farmers would let them take that waste even for free. Clearing the fields in time is the major constraint here - the window is extremely narrow (like a few weeks or something).

This is really cool. The corn byproducts are probably targeted because they are already harvested, but I imagine this tech would be applicable to a lot of plant matter.

I look at all these bodies of water with massive algae blooms from fertilizer runoff and figure whomever figures out how to harvest that and make fuel out of it will be very wealthy indeed.

corn by products?,cobs, stalks, leaves, roots ? also called stover, is left in the field after harvesting the actual corn kernals. Gathering and removal costs will be substansial and will have a negative impact on soil fertility. Also the stover and lost corn kernals provide significant food to wild animals, so there will be further enviromental costs to removing the stover. There have been many attempts to utilise corn and other grain's stover, but all of them have been marginaly profitable. Cellulose is hard to remove or convert, and the silica content makes the materials abrasive and wears machinery, and generate a lot of ash when burned, when all of this is factored into it's light weight and huge distancecs that must be driven to gather and transport it, there you have it. Various schemes have been developed to ,upgrade stover as fuel, by windrowing it, letting it ret, then drying, and then pellitising it for fuel..... it works, but it's a lot of management, and the work must be done durring the right weather. This also will apply to the latest idea under discussion here, now.

Interesting. I wish scientists would discover a way to reduce energy consumption.

related: A metagenomic ‘dark matter’ enzyme catalyses oxidative cellulose conversion [1]

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08553-z

But isn't that waste required for soil to remain fertile?

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