Thank you very much for the question.
Let me start off by saying that ethanol is ethanol. The molecule that we make at Iogen using cellulose is the same molecule as Mr. Baker makes using grain. Ethanol is ethanol. But you're right, our ethanol comes from various feedstocks that are high in cellulose content. We can use any number of grasses.
In Canada, if you were building a plant in Ontario, you'd be using corn cobs and stocks and leaves, because we grow a lot of corn in southwestern Ontario. In the Prairies--in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta--you'd be using cereal straw. We grow a lot of wheat and barley in western Canada, so we would use the straw from the wheat and barley.
We can also use things like switchgrass, which is a native prairie grass that grew back in the days when the buffalo roamed. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has identified switchgrass as a dedicated grass that it would like to see farmers start to grow as an energy crop on land that they're not currently growing crops on, or on marginal land where they could actually grow an energy crop such as a native prairie grass.
Your description of the process is correct. We bring in these big bales of straw, and we add enzymes. Enzymes are no different from the saliva in our mouths that helps us digest food and starts to break it down the minute we put food in our mouths. These enzymes attack the cellulose and convert that cellulose to glucose. Glucose is just sugar, so you ferment it and distill it to make alcohol.
It doesn't have to be used in an E85. Right across the country--and this is a little bit to the question that member Holland asked--E10 blends can be used by all cars today. All car manufacturers warrant up to the blending of 10% ethanol. It goes seamlessly into the existing infrastructure.
As for the E85 that you talk about, which is 85% ethanol and 15% gasoline, we have a fleet of vehicles at Iogen that run on cellulose E85. These are called flexible fuel vehicles. They exist because of U.S. law, not because of Canadian law. The U.S. CAFE standards--corporate average fuel economy--require that across your vehicle fleet, if you're an automotive manufacturer, you have to have a minimum of...I forget if it's 28 miles to the gallon. If everybody were buying Geo Metros, that would be easy. If everybody is buying SUVs, it's hard to meet those mileage standards, but you get a credit against your CAFE standards for alternate fuel vehicles. So if you can run a vehicle on 85% ethanol....
Chrysler makes them, Ford makes them, General Motors makes them. There are about, I can't remember, six or eight million of them on the road in the U.S. today. We have a fleet of E85s. I've been running my Chevy Impala on cellulose E85 for the last two and a half years.