Coskata switches focus to Ethanol from natural gas

[Bill USA]

http://www.biofuelsdigest.com/bdigest/2012/07/20/coskata-switches-from-biomass-to-natural-gas-to-raise-100m-in-natgas-oriented-private-placement/

The Coskata project always had a natural gas component, so in dropping the biomass component there is a lot of cost that just falls away. Material handling, chipping, sizing, drying, gasification, gas clean up – all those unit costs come out.

The impact for Coskata? A 130 million gallon natural gas project costs the same as a 65 million gallon woody biomass project.

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The company has plans on the drawing board, for example, for a 270 million gallon project, although economies of scale are reached with natural gas in the 130 million gallon range.

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Others in the queue that may switch to natural gas

...in recent months, there’s been Sundrop Fuels, and Primus Green Energy – with Coskata we now have three, and that makes a trend.

Who’s next? Siluria has been focused on natural gas for quite some time. Accelergy has been pursuing a combination of coal and biomass in China within an overall XTL focus, and let’s see how their project opportunities change.



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[mike_c]

1. LOL-- it's still as bad an idea in this thread as it was in the last....

What part of "burning the carbon in fossil fuels produces green house gasses" is so hard to understand? Ultimately, every carbon molecule in the original fuel stock must be accounted for. It all goes into the atmosphere, whether burned as natural gas or whether burned as ethanol. Thus hastening the day that we convert the last reserves of fossil fuels into green house gasses.

[Bill USA]

2. betting on an uninterrupted supply of oil for the next 20-30 years are you? I wish I could laugh!

http://www.democraticunderground.com/112739459#post3

[Bill USA]

3. if this move was to limit work on renewables it would be different. Progress on renewables is not

proceeding quickly enough for a variety of reasons. We could add methanol from forestry and agricultural waste for more renewable fuel but the Oil industry would fight that too.

If we had a real program to advance renewables we would have required all cars to be FFVs - and that they be made to optimize ethanol's (and methanol's) higher octane than gasoline's and achieve better fuel efficiency than cars running on gasoline. THus, even using fossil gas to make ethanol/methanol we would still be lowering GHGs versus using only gasoline. see?