Technical advances will define to what extent agricultural and wastewater resources can be transformed into quantities of electricity and liquid and gaseous fuels as energy carriers and to what extent these will contribute to local and national power demands, but certain industries could benefit greatly from considering their wastes as sources of bioenergy, either for immediate use or as a saleable commodity. To illustrate this, a bilateral study between Japan and Malaysia of the waste streams from the Malaysian palm oil industry (42.5 million tons in 2001) demonstrated that, with Enterobacter and Clostridium strains evolving H2 or producing acetone, buta­nol, and ethanol (chapter 6, section 6.3.3), more than 62,000 tons of oil equivalent in total energy could be generated.113

Biohydrogen (however it is produced by living cells) has the potential to mar­ginalize all other biofuels, from ethanol and biodiesel to all presently contemplated “bio” options for mass transportation — if, that is, onboard fuel cells achieve their cost and vehicle range targets. In one possible future, mariculture units growing cya­nobacteria in coastal waters will be the sources of renewable energy from water and sunlight, providing the H2 as the most environmentally friendly energy carrier.114 In another (Chinese) model, cultures of Propionibacterium, Clostridium, and Bacteri — odes species relentlessly ferment whatever substrates can be made available to them to form H2 and ethanol and/or mixtures of acids, quite independently of sunlight, and in processes that can be managed by simply adjusting the pH to determine the product stream.115

Even the hydrogen economy has its critics, however, and in another possible future, hybrid gasoline-electric vehicles will dominate the highways by as early as 2020, reducing gasoline and greenhouse gas emissions by 30-50%, with no major investments in fuel infrastructure; they may even be dually hybrid, being able to run on gasoline-biofuel blends, traveling 500 miles on a gallon of gasoline mixed with five gallons of cellulosic ethanol.116

When, in 1975, Ballard occupied a derelict motel in southern Arizona at the beginning of the quest to develop a viable technology to power an electric vehicle and so reduce dependency on fossil fuels, optimism may have been tempered with the realization that a long and uncertain journey had just commenced, but optimism was certainly rampant by the late 1990s.117 As an “entirely unauthorized” biography of Ballard (the early pacesetters in fuel cell technology for transportation) noted, the starting pistol for the race to develop a marketable fuel cell-powered automobile was fired in April 1997 when Daimler-Benz paid nearly $200 million for a 25% share in Ballard and committed itself to invest a further $300 million.118 A decade later, prog­ress continues worldwide, but projections about who crosses the winning line first and the eventual date of mass use of such ecofriendly vehicles tends to relentlessly slip back into “decades away” — inventors have, necessarily, to be ever hopeful about the futures of their brain children but underestimate production costs and the full sequence of engineering and other events that lead to commercialization.

Even if developments in the next two to three decades render both fuel ethanol and biodiesel obsolete, however, the many advances made in the biotechnology of the bioproduction of biofuels will not prove to be wasted. To return once more to the preface, biomass as the main supply of chemical feedstocks may be unavoidable in the twenty-first century as increased demand for gasoline in the rapidly developing economies of Asia and South America applies a price tourniquet to petrochemicals, particularly rapidly if oil reserves prove smaller than estimated or if an accelerat­ing CO2-dominated climate change forces political action to restrain CO2-producing industries.118 Can agricultural sources ever be justified as substrates for the produc­tion of transportation fuels? Or solely for automobile fuels?

Or can biofuels gain global approval as part of the mix of products emanating from biorefineries, in a flexible output that could replace petrochemicals, provide biofuels for blends according to market demands, and provide fuels for multiple types of fuel cells? The next and final chapter explores how the biorefinery concept emerged in the 1990s to be the beacon of a radically different vision of how biotech­nology and commodity chemical production can merge in another blueprint for a sustainable mobile and industrial society.