Like watermelons? Me too! Especially when you upend a bottle of vodka into them and make a tasty adult picnic snack.
So while it doesn’t surprise me that watermelons and alcohol go together, I was pleased to learn that watermelons may be the next go-to crop for making ethanol. I learned from Slashdot that the USDA is looking at watermelons for ethanol production, citing their high levels of fermentable sugars.
Why is this better than corn, which is how most of our ethanol currently ges produced? Well, waste corn can be processed into lots of different things — from corn syrup to animal feed — and ethanol is just one use for it.
But, apparently upwards of 20% of watermelon production is just left on the fields, because it’s not pretty enough to humans to buy it in the store. That waste product can be fermented into ethanol.
Eventually, of course, the holy grail is to take completely unusable woody plant stalks, which we mostly just plough under right now, and turn that into ethanol, but we haven’t figured out how to break it down yet. In the meantime, anything that gets us off of corn-based ethanol (or, worse, sugar-cane-based) is good in my books.
(Watermelon pic from Flickr user babasteve)
Grant Hamilton
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