Patrick Foody and his sons hoped to harness this to solve the energy crisis.
Brian Foody's Chevy Impala can run on either gasoline or fuel that's 85 percent ethanol.
Foody's company, Iogen, makes it here at its experimental plant on the outskirts of Ottawa.
Iogen's Brian Foody says he could help solve the problem by building ethanol plants everywhere.
Mr. FOODY: That would be many hundreds of plants like this, but much bigger, all over America.
Brian Foody leads the way to Iogen's laboratory and pulls a petri dish out of a refrigerator.
Foody says there are lots of other possible ingredients: corn stocks, fast-growing weeds like switch grass, even municipal waste.
Mr. BRIAN FOODY (CEO, Iogen Corporation): It's one of five million flexible fuel cars on the road in North America.
Mr. FOODY: By different kinds of microbes, which have wanted to eat them, digest them, and make food out of them.
Mr. FOODY: So when you actually look at a cellulose ethanol facility, it doesn't take in any fossil fuels at all.
Mr. FOODY: We chose straw, wheat straw, in particular, that you're looking at here because people do collect some amount of it.
Mr. FOODY: We take this fungus, this furry little bit of mold, scrape it off and put it inside a small flask.
Foody stops near a machine that looks like a giant accordion.
Mr. FOODY: Somewhere between 50 and 100 billion gallons a year of cellulose ethanol could be made in the United States, just from the available resources.
Mr. FOODY: And they found a fungus that produced a chemical called an enzyme that would break all sorts of fiber, cotton, clothes tents, down into sugar.
This could be pretty useful when the smartphone is the lunchtime companion and you don't want to grease it up with foody fingers, but again, the "air swipe to scroll" shows up in only a few applications.
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