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by patwolf 331 days ago
> Surely you are old enough to hear the comotion about switchgrass

I hadn't heard "switchgrass" since GWB mentioned it in his State of the Union years ago. Did it end up becoming a significant source of biofuel?

1 comments

No. My company did some work in that area.

It works fine in the lab, but there's a lot of engineering that needs to be done in order to scale it up to industrial levels. Some failures are going to happen along the way, and failures at that scale break companies.

That engineering only gets done is there's money in it - and oil's been cheap bar some temporary upsets. So the pilot plants were shut down or converted to biodiesel, which is much less risky.

Once the economics change again, you'll see movement in that area (assuming EV doesn't completely take over).