Ethanol has had its highs and lows. Which way is it headed now?

Fermentation. What would we do without it? It’s a little trick that microbes figured out billions of years ago as a way of getting energy from carbohydrates. Then way back in prehistoric times, we humans figured out how to hijack that microbial process for our own purposes — and for millennia that purpose was making alcohol from sugar for libation (and I imagine since then there’s been a whole lot of libation).

But eventually we came upon a more sober application of alcohol: fuel. First used in 1826 to power internal combustion engines, ethyl alcohol, as it was then called, gained a foothold in Europe in the