in the case of rice straw for example well over half a billion tonnes is available in asia and this material is routinely burned biorefining rice straw would reduce ghg and other emissions by avoiding burning the usda has been addressing the needs for new feedstocks box while at the same time helping to maintain and develop the first generation ethanol and biodiesel industry one advantage of this usda programme was that it provided incentives for field researchers those optimising crops as feedstocks for biofuels to work closely with researchers developing biorefinery technologies as the industry evolved focus has gone from creating corn and grainderived ethanol to creating cellulosic ethanol and now toward development of integrated processes that produce dropin replacements for petroleum products technologies to produce advanced biofuels such as nbutanol pyrolysis biooil hydroxymethylfurfural liquefied biogas and even biohydrogen have been developed and are arguably commercially viable