Startup Says It Can Make Ethanol for $1 a Gallon, and Without Corn

[BadgerKid]

A biofuel startup in Illinois can make ethanol from just about anything organic for less than $1 per gallon, and it wouldn't interfere with food supplies, company officials said.

...

"It's not five years away, it's not 10 years away. It's affordable, and it's now," said Wes Bolsen, the company's vice president of business development.

Besides cutting production costs to fire sale prices, the process avoids some key drawbacks of making ethanol from corn, company officials said. It wouldn't impact the food supply, and its net energy balance is high because the technique works almost anywhere using almost anything with great efficiency. The end result will be E85 sold at the pump for about a dollar cheaper per gallon than gasoline, according to the company.

...

The company plans to have its first commercial-scale plant producing up to 100,000 gallons of ethanol a year by 2011. Friedman and Greene said the timeline is realistic.


http://www.wired.com/cars/energy/news/2008/01/ethanol23

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Several interesting projections. Noted is lack of infrastructure for ethanol distribution. IMO this could be rectified in part by implementing new energy policies.

[Bonobo]

1. Don't get in any small aircraft would be my advice.

[Clovis Sangrail]

2. we don't need no stinkin' corn

Farmers in Nebraska and the Dakotas brought the U.S. closer to becoming a biofuel economy, planting huge tracts of land for the first time with switchgrass—a native North American perennial grass (Panicum virgatum) that often grows on the borders of cropland naturally—and proving that it can deliver more than five times more energy than it takes to grow it.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=grass-makes-better-ethanol-than-corn

[truedelphi]

6. Thanks for this info Clovis

Hem,p woul dbe good also, right?

[DCKit]

3. The science angle from the above link:

"Coskata uses existing gasification technology to convert almost any organic material into synthesis gas, which is a mix of carbon monoxide and hydrogen. Rather than fermenting that gas or using thermo-chemical catalysts to produce ethanol, Coskata pumps it into a reactor containing bacteria that consume the gas and excrete ethanol. Richard Tobey, Coskata's vice president of engineering, says the process yields 99.7 percent pure ethanol."

So they could build one plant and provide both cooking/heating gas and ethanol. Sweet.

[eppur_se_muova]

7. Thanks! Someone had mentioned CO-consuming bacteria before ...

and I was extremely skeptical.

Bacteria aren't magic; they can't create energy out of nothing, or produce less CO2 than a chemical process that does the same transformation. The wording in the article couldn't be murkier:

Rather than fermenting that gas or using thermo-chemical catalysts to produce ethanol, Coskata pumps it into a reactor containing bacteria that consume the gas and excrete ethanol.

If consuming the gas and excreting ethanol isn't fermentation, what the Hell is it ??

OTOH, if the gasification step works so well, I'm kind of curious why that can't be followed by Fischer-Tropf -- they are already using FT to make very low-sulfur diesel in Europe.

Some informed science journalism is definitely called for here.

[AlecBGreen]

4. lol

"Even if you produce it county by county, you still need an infrastructure," he said. "People aren't going to go to some remote location for fuel."

Yeah, nobody would drive an extra 20 miles to get fuel thats a $1 cheaper than the neighborhood gas. :eyes: What a goon.

[patch1234]

15. half of the gasoline sold in the US is E10

the infrastucture is in place now,
in large areas of the US.

[burythehatchet]

5. correct me if I'm wrong but doesn't Eth production use lots of water? n/t

[losthills]

8. You're not wrong.....

[whatdoyouthink]

9. Looks Good to me

and this - uses "less" water & Produces allot more Energy - then typical ways

AND

Can be region specific - to type of material they use

[Laelth]

10. Anybody looking for beach-front property in Florida?

:eyes:

-Laelth

[whatdoyouthink]

11. Maybe

Better then BUYING! Beach Property in Middle East!

[Laelth]

12. I think alternative energy is worth exploring.

I just don't think bio-fuels are the way to go, and the person quoted in the OP is trying to promote his company. Forgive me if I'm suspicious.

Personally, I favor a wind mill mounted on the top of every chimney in America. Make it mandatory, if need be. Electric cars might allow us to preserve some semblance of the America we know today, but I don't think bio-fuels can do it. There simply isn't enough biological material to make it work. I believe I saw, somewhere, a study that showed that if we took every, single acre of arable land in the United States, and converted all of it into production of high-ethanol yield plants, we could not produce enough ethanol in an entire growing season to match the amount of crude oil we consume in a week. That is to say that if we produced no food at all ... none ... for a whole growing season, then we could run our country for only a week at our current levels of consumption. From this I conclude, reasonably, that bio-fuel is not a viable alternative.

Like it or not, we are entirely and absolutely dependent on oil from the Middle East. No use pretending we're not, and no use pretending that bio-fuels can save us. We had better be looking for a viable alternative.

Thanks for the reply.

-Laelth

[tanstaafl]

13. Talk about drinking and driving

Can you imagine what would happen if we switched over from Oil/Gasoline to Ethanol to power our people movers.

Would you have to show proof that you were of drinking age ?

Would teens get caught buying "fuel" and then drinking it ?

Would alcoholic street bums start hanging out at gas stations ?

[Heywood J]

14. Ah, probably not.

The most akin thing would be drinking straight Everclear. It would taste like shit, burn your throat, and not many people can drink Everclear without getting terribly sick. There's a fine line into lethal alcohol poisoning that's very easy to cross in short order - it's kind of a self-fixing problem if you're stupid enough to attempt to drink fuel.


It's not like drinking a scotch or a mixed drink.