Saturday, January 26, 2008

Ha ha, fooled you Axel Foley! There's a reason why I've got a banana peel in my tailpipe...

I vaguely recall hearing about this sort of stuff before. If you remember the end of Back to the Future, Doc Brown throws all sorts of trash from Marty's garbage into the DeLorean to provide energy for the flux capacitor. Seemed crazy that you could use waste as a source of fuel, but I guess it isn't so far fetched. From Wired:

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.

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.

Tobey said Coskata's method generates more ethanol per ton of feedstock than corn-based ethanol and requires far less water, heat and pressure. Those cost savings allow it to turn, say, two bales of hay into five gallons of ethanol for less than $1 a gallon, the company said. Corn-based ethanol costs $1.40 a gallon to produce, according to the Renewable Fuels Association.
That organic material could be just about anything, which makes making ethanol quite flexible, depending on your geography:
Making ethanol is one thing, but there's almost no infrastructure in place for distributing it. But the company's method solves that problem because ethanol could be made locally from whatever feedstock is available, Tobey said.

"You're not bound by location," he said. "If you're in Orange County, you can use municipal waste. If you're in the Pacific Northwest, you can use wood waste. Florida has sugar. The Midwest has corn. Each region has been blessed with the ability to grow its own biomass."

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

While I am not sure exactly how it works even after reading it, it sounds promising. Honestly though I don't see anything coming from this. I am becoming rather jaded on alternative fuels. Not because I don't believe them, but because I don't see big car companies jumping on board with this sort of technology.

Anonymous said...

Asparagus makes your pee smell funny. WW vegetable trivia #3

Swany said...

But only if you're genetically inclined like me or Babe Ruth.