Treethanol - Drawbacks

Drawbacks

While it seems reasonable that Treethanol could be a viable improvement to current ethanol types, it has one fatal flaw, which is the extra processing needed to break down the tough cellulose and hemicellulose within the walls of the cell to isolate the sugars. As discussed above in the production section, creating ethanol from the lignocellulose found in tree biomass requires the extra step of “pre-treatment”. It is this pre-treatment that still requires too much energy to make the Treethanol worth the effort. That being said, many believe that the potential pros far out-weigh the short-term cons. The process of growing the tree biomass is incredibly energy efficient compared with growing corn or sugar cane for ethanol. However, it also takes a lot longer to grow trees than to grow corn, and so any accurate research on sustainability and crop rotation (even for fast growing trees) requires a long time commitment, which up to now has been hard to find. It has been estimated that this process, including the building of processing plants and then refining of the growing and processing stage could take at least a decade. Another possible drawback to the processing of cellulosic ethanol is that there is currently little known about the waste/by products from the different types of processing. Of particular concern to some is the biological method of pre-treatment. It is estimated that there is the possibility of producing almost as much (if not more) waste than usable ethanol, with waste products including mold, bacteria, yeast, biological toxins and allergens produced by these microorganisms, enzymes, and other chemicals.