Sustainable biofuels from forests: Meeting the challenge

For thousands of years, people have cut down trees to burn for heat and to cook their food. With the advent of the industrial revolution, wood was even used to fire the combustion engines that powered some of the earliest trains and steamboats. Today energy experts are considering the use of wood-based bioproducts to displace fossil fuels, but what they envision is something much more complex and much more efficient than simply logging trees and burning them in power plants.