At Cornell, researchers are turning beer into biofuel.
(June 28, 2012) It's not the beer that's good to drink -- but fermentation
broth, which is chemically identical to the imbibing beer, from which the fuel
ethanol is produced.
Using a mixed bag of microbes for specific chemical
reactions, biological engineers have designed a process for upgrading ethanol
into something even better -- caproic acid, a carboxylic acid that's a
versatile fuel precursor. If scaled up, their process could integrate
seamlessly into already-established ethanol production lines.