Biofuel Startup Claims It Can Make Ethanol for less than $1 per Gallon
The startup is funded by GM and other investors, and uses gasification to turn organic materials into carbon monoxide and hydrogen by reacting the raw material at high temperatures with a controlled amount of oxygen.
What is unique about this company is that, “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.” Gasification is a questionable way to go, because were it feasible and cost-effective, we wouldn’t still be throwing away valuable, carbon-rich garbage into overflowing landfills when it could be converted to energy.
The use of bacteria to convert the gas into ethanol sounds like a great idea, and may just work. Using a living, renewable resource like bacteria and algae as a part of an industrial process that helps to reduce the global footprint and repair the earth is a definite win. I previously posted about converting CO2 into biofuels using algae here.
Here is an exerpt from the Wired article:
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.
Coskata, which is backed by General Motors and other investors, uses bacteria to convert almost any organic material, from corn husks (but not the corn itself) to municipal trash, into ethanol.
“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.
The discovery underscores the rapid innovation under way in the race to make cellulosic ethanol cheaply. With the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 requiring an almost five-fold increase in ethanol production to 36 billion gallons annually by 2022, scientists are working quickly to reach that breakthrough.
…Coskata won’t have a pilot plant running until this time next year, and it will produce just 40,000 gallons a year. Still, several experts said Coskata shows enough promise to leave them cautiously optimistic.
…
Gasification and bacterial conversion are common methods of producing ethanol, but biofuel experts said Coskata is the first to combine them. Doing so, they said, merges the feedstock flexibility of gasification with the relatively low cost of bacterial conversion.
Cautious optimism is better than apathy and despair. Hopefully such reasonable and sustainable alternative methods of creating ethanol fuel will succeed, because otherwise the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 mandating ethanol production will encourage unsustainable methods of biofuel production. More specifically, the act will blanket the country in corn fields. Converting food crops into ethanol is a terrible idea that wastes farmland, raises food prices, damages the ecosystem, pollutes the earth, and only benefits those that profit from the forced use of ethanol. Let’s just hope Coskata finds renewable sources of carbon-rich biomass, and doesn’t decide to start using trees for fuel.
link to the Wired article Startup Says It Can Make Ethanol for $1 a Gallon, and Without Corn
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