Tobacco Will Be Our Energy Source

By: Yoko

Original source:

1) High Lander. (5/7/2013). UC Berkeley: Using tobacco crops as biofuel source (p.5)

2)NationalGeographic http://environment.nationalgeographic.com/environment/global-warming/biofuel-profile

Researchers from UC Berkeley and the University Kentucky found that Tobacco will be a good biofuel source. They extracted oil from tobacco by infusing genes from algae to the leaves of tobacco. 

 

 They focused on tobacco crop to use as a biofeul. Actually, according to Faculty Biologist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Center and one of the head researchers, Anastasios Melis, there are more productive plants to use as a biofuel source. Corn and Sugarcane are one of them. These are widely used today. Although they have high biomass in their leaves, they are also food crops so they bring about debates. Grasses, for example, giganteous and napier, are also used today. They can be turned into carbon fuels too, but it is difficult to accumulate hydrocarbon products from them.

Now, they succeeded to accumulate about 1 percent of its dry weight in the form of specific hydrocarbon that can be used as fuel. They are trying to reach10 percent within two years.

In addition to this effort, they also attempting to make tobacco uptake more carbon from the atmosphere and produce more oxygen by the process of photosynthesis like algae. When fuels are burned, it produces carbon but if the plant assimilates it, it will be a good cycle of energy.

This technique which inserts certain gene to tobacco to use as fuels would be a good solution to the problem of energy.  Tobacco will not cause controversy of food problem. But still it’s not so practical. Because the amount of the energy we can take from tobacco is so small. Besides, it might cost more and produce more carbon to grow and modify crops than to fossil fuel.