Josephine works in a biology lab at UCLA and they have recently come up with a magic strain of bacteria that converts cellulose (the dominant organic component of grass clippings) into glucose. To create ethanol fuel, Joe and Josephine put the wet grass clippings into barrels, and then add an equal mass of water, plus a cup of the magic bacteria and then they let it sit for two weeks while the cellulose is converted to glucose. Then, Joe takes the resulting glucose solution and adds yeast to ferment the solution to produce a 15% ethanol solution, which takes an additional week. Then, every week, he burns additional grass clippings in a large still to distill the 15% ethanol solution to create a 95% ethanol solution.
The resulting distillate is clean-burning fuel, which Joe uses to power his riding mower, which he has, of course, modified to run on ethanol. Ignoring the fact that the magic strain of bacteria doesn’t really exist, will this scheme work?