Why Isn’t This Biofuel Company Receiving Billions in Government Aid?

At $3.15 a gallon, the price of gasoline is hurting all the richest of Americans.

Besides the economic drag, the U.S. exposes itself to the whims of third world countries like Saudi Arabia, Iran, Mexico, and Venezuela–even the Russians figure into the global oil market. And additionally, you have to figure in the billions that imported oil aids to our trade deficit.

With all the negatives that can be attributed to imported oil, why isn’t our government promoting viable alternatives?

In case our bureaucracy and our politicians need a pointer in the right direction, here is a company that claims it can create ethanol from multiple sources, such as solid waste and farm waste and produce fuel for $1.00 a gallon. Why isn’t this technology receiving massive government support? Isn’t energy independence in the national interest?

This company says that its methods doesn’t rely upon food stock, its cheap, and the technology is here right now.

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.

“It signals just how hot the competition is right now,” said David Friedman, research director of the clean vehicles program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “There are a lot of people diving into this right now, trying to figure out how to crack the nut. This increases my confidence that someone will do it.”

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. Read more….

The name of the company is Coskata and here is what their website has to say:

What raw materials can Coskata’s process use?Coskata’s process can utilize virtually any carbon-containing feedstock. This includes cellulose-based energy crops such as switchgrass, wood chips, agricultural residues (bagasse, corn stover, etc.) as well as waste streams such as old tires and municipal solid waste. Feedstock flexibility allows the Coskata process to utilize non-food, locally abundant raw materials.

Can you use garbage in your process?Garbage and many other waste streams can be used in our process. Our process works best with materials that have low moisture and low amounts of non-combustibles like glass and metals.

How small or large can Coskata’s facilities be?
Our process is best optimized within facilities that are ~50 million gallons per year or larger, requiring roughly 1500+ dry tons of material per day. Although technically feasible, smaller facilities are more costly to develop making them less economical. Our process can scale to much larger sizes, with size being limited only by the amount of available feedstock in a local area.

How are you different from corn ethanol?
There are several fundamental differences between Coskata’s process and typical corn ethanol production:

• Process Technology – Coskata’s process varies significantly from the traditional corn-based ethanol process. Corn ethanol is produced via the fermentation of sugars. Corn kernels are broken down into sugars through milling and hydrolysis operations. Coskata’s ethanol is produced via the fermentation of synthetic gas, or ‘syngas’ mainly made up of Carbon Monoxide and Hydrogen. A wide assortment of raw materials can be broken down into syngas using a process called gasification.
• Feedstock flexible – Our process can utilize a variety of raw materials to produce ethanol, bringing two distinct advantages:

i) Nonfood resources can be used, mitigating many of the food vs. fuel concerns that have arisen.
ii) Ethanol production can take place in geographical areas where corn is not available, resulting in a many fold increase in the
potential biofuel volumes that can be produced.

• Efficiency – Our process is designed to capture efficiencies wherever possible, requiring comparatively little fossil energy input. A life cycle analysis performed by Argonne National Laboratory has determined that the Coskata process yields up to a 7.7 net energy balance which compares favorably to the 1.3 net energy balance reported for corn based ethanol. Water usage for the process is forecasted to be as low as 1 gallon or less per gallon of ethanol produced versus 3-6 for the corn process.

What does net energy balance mean and why is this important?
Net energy balance refers to the amount of fossil fuel input required to produce a given amount of liquid fuel energy output. It is an important metric as it correlates with the green house gas emissions (GHG) associated with that process, along with the efficient use of fossil resources. To determine net energy balance, the fossil energy inputs for the entire supply chain are taken into account, from growing, harvesting and transporting the feedstock, to producing and distributing the fuel into people’s gas tanks. One such study by Argonne National Laboratory has determined that Coskata’s ethanol production process can reach a net energy balance of 7.7 and reduce lifecycle GHG emissions by up to 84% versus conventional gasoline.

Isn’t Ethanol still hard to transport?
Given the distance between agricultural centers and urban centers, transportation usually makes up a significant portion of the overall cost of ethanol. Coskata’s versatile process, however, can break this transportation barrier by using more regionally available feedstocks. This also gives us the opportunity to develop ethanol in areas of the world where it was not previously viable. Coskata may not need to ever pipeline our ethanol since we can build the plant where the consumer lives.

How much does our process cost?
Coskata’s process can produce ethanol at under US $1 / gallon. Our process has several cost advantages over other next generation ethanol production methods including:

• Yield: Our process produces over 100 gallons of ethanol per dry ton of feedstock which not only reduces our feedstock cost, but also reduces nearly all other costs on a per gallon basis.
• Produces only ethanol, not a mixed-alcohol that needs to be separated.
• Simple design: Our process does not require extensive pretreatment processes or inputs like enzymes or chemical catalysts. We also do not have the back end solids handling and drying of lignin that other processes have.

Why isn’t this a national priority? To hell with the market system. If this company needs $20 billion dollars to get this system up and running, I’d be willing to buy a government “ethanol” bond today.

Trackposted to Outside the Beltway, Diary of the Mad Pigeon, Rosemary’s Thoughts, Faultline USA, third world county, A Blog For All, Right Truth, The World According to Carl, Shadowscope, Pirate’s Cove, The Pink Flamingo, Dumb Ox Daily News, Right Voices, The Yankee Sailor, and , thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

Related posts:

The Folly of Corn Based Ethanol

Tags: Biofuel, corn, Coskata, ethanol