It naturally produces short-chain oils and has been grown as a food crop for centuries in southern and eastern Europe and is used a biofuel crop in North America.
Incidentally, in making charcoal this way, there is a by-product of biofuel that the farmer can sell.
Either way, the result is a biofuel for generating electricity.
Commodities such as corn (which in America is used to produce everything from biofuel to syrup) and soya have become less valuable of late thanks to soaring supply and weak demand.
To use them to best advantage, the IEA is urging governments to use smart subsidies that discriminate in favour of the greenest forms of biofuel.
But if that could be done economically, biofuel aquaculture would be about as green as you could get.
The result, according to Codexis's boss, Alan Shaw, is enzymes that can perform chemical transformations unknown in nature.Dr Shaw, however, is no longer so interested in octanol as a biofuel.
Yet blenders and consumers have no means of distinguishing good biofuel from bad.Biofuels from poor but sunny countries, where crops yield much more energy and costs are lower, tend to be both cheaper and more environmentally friendly.
This would make maize (which is one of the main sources of biofuel) a particularly bad contributor to global N2O emissions.But it is not just biofuels that are to blame.
America's generous subsidies for biofuel have increased the harvest of water-intensive crops that are now used for energy as well as food.
Dank, cloudy and small, Britain is ill-suited to mass production of the fast-growing crops favoured by the biofuel industry.
