Creating Ethanol for $1 a Gallon From Anything Organic
Tagged with: automotive • biofuel • ecology • ethanol • green • Science • Wired Magazine
… Yes! Anything! That means, corn husks, trash, you name it. This great news comes from a Wired Magazine 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.
This is pretty hug news. Imagine a system of energy where local cities and towns become closed energy loops. The waste we produce is turned into fuel for cars that is only shipped to local gas stations. This minimizes waste and increase efficiency across the board.
The other thing it makes me think of is the last scene in “Back to the Future” where Doc drives up and refuels his car with trash from Marty’s trash can. With the technology presented above this idea is a lot closer than I first thought when I saw the movie. 
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January 29th, 2008 at 6:26 am
I’m going to try this comment thing again. The anti-spam ate it last time.
One of the good things about the internet, is that the ethanol claims were quickly debunked. Growing crops for fuel instead of crops for food has to be one of the dumbest schemes ever. Are we so in love with oil that we would rather starve than give up our vehicles?
Even if the entire arable land mass in the U.S. was converted to fuel crops, it would fall short of replacing gasoline. Trash to ethanol when combined with many other options will help, but no technology currently exists to complete replace gasoline and diesel.
January 29th, 2008 at 8:51 am
Hey Brian! Thanks for the comment
I would be curious to read more of your thoughts on this…
Ethanol is not very efficient. I won’t argue this point. But Cellulose Ethanol is very efficient and does not have to come from crops at all. With a bacterial agent to start the process of breaking down the material, you can make Cellulose Ethanol from a wide variety of sources. And the kind of Ethanol I was writing about in this post is that very kind.
The idea of using any type of ethanol is not to completely replace oil, but to minimize our use of foreign oil. Currently 80% or so of the oil we get is from overseas. A lot of that comes from the Middle East. Essentially we are funding the same terrorists that are killing our military members overseas. For more on this issue I recommend the Economist, BBC, or listen to Fareed Zakaria.
So wouldn’t it be great to have multiple sources of fuel at the pump. I envision someday going to the pump and being able to choose between, Ethanol, Gas, Diesel, Bio-Diesel, Hydrogen, Quick Electric Charge, and hopefully others. Now Gas has competition, but this also means we can rid ourselves of foreign oil. This I like.
January 29th, 2008 at 1:39 pm
You’re welcome. Here’s a link that explains what I mean. http://genomicsgtl.energy.gov/biofuels/transportation.shtml
In America we use around 150 billion gallons of gasoline and 50 billion gallons of diesel fuel every year. Currently one acre of biomass yields about 350 gallons of ethanol which only replaces 245 gallons of gasoline. Total land area in North America including Central America is 6,050,697,738 acres. There isn’t enough land available or biomass to completely replace our use of gas.
I agree that we need to replace as must foreign oil as possible, but when corn stocks are removed from the food supply, that is not very smart. Farming as a whole is extremely destructive to the environment and all we have to do is look at the rain forest in Brazil and Indonesia to see the results of biofuel. Both sugar cane in the Amazon and palm oil plantations in Borneo are causing vast amounts of damage.
Biofuel from any source is not ‘free’ energy, which seems to be the theme from many I’ve read. Nor is it ‘green’. The best case scenario is the one you point out in your comment, that we can use the existing trash stream to tap energy. Without a concerted effort from industry, government and the willingness of we the people, everyone is in for a nasty shock in the very near future.
January 29th, 2008 at 3:01 pm
Damn! I lost my comment too
Thanks for the link and your comments Brian, they are always welcome here.
And yes I do agree with you, it would be pointless to turn our supply of corn into alternative fuel. I do think it would be really cool to have communities fund their own fuel needs by the waste of the town folk. Local towns could make more than enough money off the taxes to fund education and other needs more effectively.