$1 Gallon Ethanol with No Corn

[RedGlitter]

Startup Says It Can Make Ethanol for $1 a Gallon, and Without Corn

By Chuck Squatriglia 01.24.08 | 1:00 PM



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.

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.

"The question will come down to 'Can they deliver?'" said Nathanael Greene, a senior energy-policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council. "The approach is interesting and promising in the problems it addresses."

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.

The company plans to have its first commercial-scale plant producing up to 100,000 gallons of ethanol a year by 2011. Friedman and Greene said the timeline is realistic.

May Wu, an environmental scientist at Argonne National Laboratory, says Coskata's ethanol produces 84 percent less greenhouse gas than fossil fuel even after accounting for the energy needed to produce and transport the feedstock. It also generates 7.7 times more energy than is required to produce it. Corn ethanol typically generates 1.3 times more energy than is used producing it.

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."

Still, consumers will need some way of getting that fuel into their vehicle. Less than 1 percent of the nation's 170,000 gas stations sell E85, said Mike Omotoso, senior manager of the global power train group at J.D. Power & Associates.

"Even if you produce it county by county, you still need an infrastructure," he said. "People aren't going to go to some remote location for fuel."

But with production set to ramp up quickly to meet the 36 billion gallon mandate, ethanol advocates believe it won't be long before E85 is widely available.

[Galbally]

Yep, this is certainly a big area in using biological processes to make second generation biofuels, one of the crops I am studying is called Miscanthus and it is a good candidate for an agricultural feedstock for bacterial digestion as it can be grown on marginal land not suitable for food production and seems to thrive in Western European and particularly in certain US Climates.

The exciting thing about a breakthrough bacterial-based processing route is that it involves little energy in the processing step (in other words you don't need to use electricity to power the machines that process the crops into fuel as obviously this makes biofuels less attractive as ways of reducing carbon emissions). Also of course if you can use any organic matter containing cellulosic bonds to make ethanol then you don't have to use up valuable land and crops for fuel that are also needed to make food. I must look more closely at this company's claims as I had thought we were still a couple of years away from a really efficient bacterial method of making biofuels, but I am not a biologist so I am not as up to date on whats going on in that area, though there are people I work with who would know more about that side of things, I am more on the chemistry and biosystems-engineering (not to be confused with genetic engineering) side of things.

[RedGlitter]

Galbally;764811 wrote: Yep, this is certainly a big area in using biological processes to make second generation biofuels, one of the crops I am studying is called Miscanthus and it is a good candidate for an agricultural feedstock for bacterial digestion as it can be grown on marginal land not suitable for food production and seems to thrive in Western European and particularly in certain US Climates.

The exciting thing about a breakthrough bacterial-based processing route is that it involves little energy in the processing step (in other words you don't need to use electricity to power the machines that process the crops into fuel as obviously this makes biofuels less attractive as ways of reducing carbon emissions). Also of course if you can use any organic matter containing cellulosic bonds to make ethanol then you don't have to use up valuable land and crops for fuel that are also needed to make food. I must look more closely at this company's claims as I had thought we were still a couple of years away from a really efficient bacterial method of making biofuels, but I am not a biologist so I am not as up to date on whats going on in that area, though there are people I work with who would know more about that side of things, I am more on the chemistry and biosystems-engineering (not to be confused with genetic engineering) side of things.


Hi Galbally!

I didn't know that. That sounds like a good thing. If you find any more out about this company or what it's doing, please tell us. I'm hoping we're not too far about from being more self sufficient.

:)

[Galbally]

RedGlitter;764978 wrote: Hi Galbally!

I didn't know that. That sounds like a good thing. If you find any more out about this company or what it's doing, please tell us. I'm hoping we're not too far about from being more self sufficient.

:)


Well RedG I sure will, though I work for the Irish Government not a company in my research project. You have to be wary of the claims of commercial company's when they make big claims, but then again they may have cracked it. With the Celluose-based bioethanol you could theoretically use anything like food waste or corn husks, or any waste or cellulose containing material, though a worry would be that people would then start destroying naturally pristine places to get lots of high-cellulose organic matter, (you know, trees and all that) but you could in essence develop a sustainable way to create huge amounts of bio-ethanol that would be essentially carbon neutral, but its the efficiency of the microbial digestion that's paramount, and then of course some organics would have different yields based on cellulose content (though with this combined gassification/digestion process you could probably make bioethanol with a very high efficiency rate anyway (if what they are saying is actually true that is). The main thing is we need to develop an energy supply that doesn't continually result in dumping billions of tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere every year, and also one that doesn't tear up all of our already overused global habitats or agricultural land that we need anyway to feed a growing world population.

I think it can be done, with a mix of much more widespread renewable energy sources like hydro, solar, and wind, also improved Nuclear power, sustainable biofuels and biomass crops, and also critically improving energy efficieny across the board, changing energy consumption habits (because thats all a lot of the waste is down to, just habits) and making people more energy concious by changing the way the costs of energy are worked out. Realistically fossil fuels are still going to be required for the next few decades, but we could drastically reduce our dependence on them if we really want to. Eventually hopefully things like nuclear fusion and advanced hydrogen based vehicle systems will mean we can go further than Carbon Neutral and actually start to redress the increased Carbon levels we have created because of industrialization, but that will take decades, but at least we have a basis on which to proceed.

In the meantime unfortunately climate change over the next few decades is inevitable, in fact its already upon us, hopefully we will end up in a best case and not a worst case scenario, though the signs at the moment are fairly ominous I have to admit.