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To: Crabbe who wrote (4605)	3/1/2006 4:58:58 AM
From: Seeker of Truth	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 218647

Here's the critical issue. The reporter says that the cellulose is converted into sugars. Later on he says that once you have "sugar" then you can make ethanol. Both of these statements are surely correct if by "sugar" we mean sucrose. However the "sugars" are not all easily converted to ethanol. This is only true of sugars with six carbon atoms or the sweet sugar of sugar cane, sucrose, which hydrolyzes very rapidly into two molecules of sugars, each with six carbon atoms. The problem is that the five carbon atom sugars are there in large quantity. Much of the five carbon atom sugar fraction is formed by the acid treatment of the cellulose. It's no easy problem. We don't know how to make ethanol from five carbon sugars. Saying it another way the enzymes we have looked at can't convert five carbon atom sugars into ethanol. I certainly hope that this difficulty can be solved but there is a question of the time required. Chemistry isn't easy. The progress of chemistry from let's say 1945 to 2005 has been much slower than that of electronics. The more complex the system the less predictable. The less predictable, the slower the progress.