Corn ethanol was once the undisputed darling of the biofuel industry, but the drought that withered last summer’s corn harvests down to the bone has highlighted the unsustainable tension between corn for fuel and corn for food, lending new urgency to the search for alternatives.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has been egging things along with new research, and the latest contender it has tapped is elephant grass, aka napiergrass or Pennisetum purpureum, a gigantic tropical grass that was introduced to the U.S. from Africa in 1913.
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About Christopher DeMorro
