An environmental expert has taken to task the Reading, UK city council for what he says is "incompetence" regarding the city's purchase of city buses designed to run on ethanol, according to the Reading Chronicle.

The city announced last week that bio-ethanol buses would be withdrawn because they cost twice as much to run as those with bio-diesel systems.

Reading University professor Paul Bardos has since called out the city for not looking closer at the kind of ethanol they would burn.

The Chronicle said the fleet of 14 buses had not been running on bio-ethanol derived from sugar waste, which was the green message when the fleet first took the road, but on fuel based on wood pulp imported from Sweden.

"There are a lot of sustainability questions about first generation bio-fuels like those which are sugar-based," Bardos told the Chronicle.

"First generation uses a commodity that could also be used as a food stock, whereas second generation uses waste materials. So the supplier has in some ways done them a favor by giving them fuel from a more sustainable source.

"Just last week I saw a passing bus carrying the slogan, 'I'm running on sugar waste' and that's not true. Sugar-based ethanol is made from sugar beet not waste, they should been have known this for two years and yet they continued to push these claims."

(Reading Chronicle, Oct. 21, 2009)
(http://www.readingchronicle.co.uk/…)

DTN: With all due respect to professor Paul Bardos, there are several companies producing at least some ethanol using a sugarcane waste called bagasse. Bagasse is the remaining fibrous material left after juices are squeezed from sugarcane. For example, Coskata Inc. started production at its demonstration-scale plant in Madison, Pa., making ethanol using bagasse. In addition, companies like Verenium are producing ethanol using bagasse at a demonstration plant in Jennings, La. Abengoa, the largest ethanol producer in Europe, also uses sugarcane bagasse. Whether or not the buses in question use the kind of ethanol as advertised is irrelevant. Cellulosic ethanol in general, regardless of feedstock, is considered to have a much lower carbon footprint that ethanol produced using grains or other feed- and food-type crops. (Todd Neeley)