News
Canadians, Israelis collaborate on biofuel research
December 1, 2015 by The Canadian Jewish News
November 28, 2015 – Drive by a farm in southern Ontario in October or November and you’ll see fields golden and thick with plant matter. The corn or other crops have been harvested, but there is plenty that remains – the agricultural equivalent of end cuts and remnants.
Farmers feed some of it to their livestock, but when McGill University scientist Donald Smith looks at fields overflowing with biomatter, he doesn’t see just cow fodder. He sees fuel, admittedly not something that can be put directly into your car engine today, but the biomass that can provide a substitute for petroleum in the future.
As things stand today, the technology to turn that brown gold into liquid fuel in a way that can compete economically with fossil fuels is still years away, but there’s no time like the present to set out on the research journey that will make it a commonplace reality.
With that in mind, Smith, along with 10 other scientists and researchers from BioFuelNet Canada, travelled to Israel earlier this month to attend the “Israel-Canada Workshop on Advanced Biofuels.”
