Voice your opinion with our online form. It's not quite like the movie Back to the Future, where Doc Brown uses a banana peel and other waste to power his time machine, but advances in genetic engineering will one day allow farmers to specifically grow crops to be used as fuel, a Battelle researcher says. He said DNA developments have major implications for making greater use of crops as energy and reducing U.S. dependence on foreign oil.
Corn already is used for producing ethanol.
But what Mr. Millett is talking about are DNA-engineered crops that would be used specifically to produce ethanol and methanol. It doesn't have to be the same as what we eat. Another major technology change will be with fuel cells, which rely on hydrogen to create electricity. The concept of fuel cells dates to the 1840s, but the technology has been expensive, he said. They could replace the huge power grids that can fail and produce regional blackouts.