New company that produces ethanol from any biomass, used tires and municipal waste for under $1.00 per gallon using a new process utilizing microorganisms. Turning garbage into a fuel sounds incredible!

http://www.coskata.com/

I love these guys that push this "New Tech" that also register the same day and have NO PRIOR posts. I'm all ears buddy, tell me more! Can I extract free energy from my brainwaves to power my home soon???

You know what I love? People who associate your number of posts as some kind of status. But you do bring up a good point with this “New Tech” maybe we should slow down and just stick with the “old tech” like using OIL to make gasoline.

So you would like me to tell you more, ok did you follow the link? What parts are you having trouble understanding?

Am I on the right forum? I assumed that this forum was about Biofuel, I guess I just didn’t expect that posting about a new process to produce a ethanol form garbage that would normally end up in a landfill would be met with such sarcasm. Is this old news to you guys or are you really just anti-biofuel? Or do I need to spam up my post count to be taken seriously?

The folks in your link are using a pretty energy inefficient process, converting everything to synth-gas takes a lot of heat, they then indicate they convert the synth-gas to a liquid that they call ethanol but it also contains other stuff ot they would not need a third step to "pervaporate" off the ethanol- all of these steps are inefficient, the only way I see them making ethanol for under a doller/gallon is if they get paid for the base waste product to begin with, It will be interesting to see if they actually can bring it in for a doller/gallon, unfortunatly there will be know way to know this except from there own statements, may be possible, hope it is.

There is a similar ethanol plant proposed for central Texas, they intend to use desert Mesquite trees as there wood source for the ethanol. This is doable but wastefull as they state that an acre of mature Mesquite brush will produce about 265 gallons of ethanol but it will take around 50 years to regrow the Mesquuit, but- an acre of Mesguite will produce enough Mesquite fruit (beans and pods) EACH YEAR to make around 300 gallons of ethanol from simple distillation of the direct sugar in the bean pods - interesting logic?

This is mostly old news, there have been posts flagging university research into the custom organisms being developed to turn almost anything organic into ethanol, hundreds of millions of dollars worth of federal grant money has gone into this over the last 10 or so years, these folks are just taking advantage of the federally funded results. One research paper I found about these newly developed organisims indicated there was enough citrus waste being landfilled each year in the state of Florida alone to make around 300 million gallons of ethanol, another indicated the unmarketable apples from California apple orchards could make around another 70 million gallons of ethanol a year. These could be processed now using standard yeasts but they would only produce around 50-60% as much ethanol as if being processed with the new designer organisms that can digest cellulose rather than just the sugars.

Depending on how you crunch the numbers ethanol from corn is costing something a bit under $2.00/gallon now to produce as about 70% of a kernal of corn is simple starch that can easily be converted to sugar and fermented with only yeast. The remaining 30% of the corn kernal is sold as "distillers grains" and is used for animal feed or sometimes used as fuel to power the distillery, eather way it has value that holds down the cost of producing the final ethanol.

A few of the newer corn ethanol distilleries are even using the corn stover (green corn stalks and cobs) as either cellulose for the new organisms to convert to sugar -or- some are even using the much older acid process to break out a lesser amount of the sugar from the cellulose (roughly 50%), the remains of these processes are then dried and used as biomass fuel for the distilleries boilers. Some of the distilleries directly use the stover as boiler fuel. The farmers are being paid an additional 40-45 dollars/acre for the stover.

Old tires - These have more value if directly used as boiler fuel. The largest corn starch/ethanol plant in the midwest is near here (ADM), they power the process with old tires, they CHARGE (not pay) 2 to 10 dollars per tire, depending on size and type. Rather than paying for there process energy they make a profit from it, as well as using the energy to make there ethanol at an even cheaper cost than there competition.