Green Options

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Earlier this year, headlines were made on the announcement of biotech start-up Coskata promising to revolutionize the production of ethanol with a process that could use a variety of feedstocks, ranging from wood chips and switchgrass, to old tires, and even directly from municipal waste. Most importantly, it did not rely on corn or other food stocks in order to produce fuel. At the time, Coskata was predicting an aggressive timeline, with a pilot demonstration plant to begin operation in 2009, and a first full-scale plant to be underway by 2011.

Last week Coskata announced the location for their pilot demonstration plant, a facility that will begin producing 40,000 gallons of ethanol per year, starting in 2009. While that is only a tiny drop in the proverbial bucket, it’s another step along the path to having a full-scale plant in operation and producing 50 to 100 million gallons of ethanol per year.

Ford Motor company announced today it would be offering a new range of alternative-fuel vehicles by early 2010, powered by what some think is the US’s only hope for energy independence: coal.

Ford says that it will be converting the massive amount of empty storage space found on their larger trucks into mobile coal-storage and processing containers:

“We’ve done some serious research on coal—since it will be the 21st century’s predominant fuel—and we’ve come up with some interesting results. For example, in extensive polling, we found that American’s don’t really care which fuel they use, as long as it’s cheap. Coal is by far the cheapest source of domestic energy we’ve got. Second, we also found that 98% of the bed space in our large trucks goes unused about 100% of the time. So, we just put two and two together.”

Plasma gasification has the potential to be a breakthrough technology. It can serve not only as a method of producing fuels, but also as a method for effectively dealing with hazardous wastes. In fact, the technology was initially developed to be a method for waste disposal, and the energy production potential was just a side benefit.

Plasma gasification was one of the more exotic methods that was discussed as a precursor for the Coskata process for ethanol production. Coskata’s method takes a stream of carbon monoxide and hydrogen (known as syngas) and feeds it through a bioreactor vessel where specialized strains of bacteria feed on the syngas and metabolize it to produce ethanol (or other alcohols, depending on the strain of bacteria in the reactor). There are numerous methods for producing syngas, some more than a century old, but others, such as the plasma gasification method, sound like the stuff of science fiction.

As you’ve almost certainly already heard by now, General Motors has announced a partnership with Coskata, Inc. to produce ethanol less expensively and without using food materials as feedstock for the process. This is exciting for a number of reasons. First of all, Coskata is close to completing a continuous demonstration stream at their laboratory. They also expect to have a pilot demonstration plant in place by the end of the year that will produce 40,000 gallons of ethanol. And later this year, they expect to announce the site for their first full-scale plant which will be capable of annual production of 100 million gallons of ethanol. The process also consumes less water resources (less than one gallon of water per gallon of ethanol produced) and delivers 7.7 units of energy per unit of energy used in the process.

The process relies on using anaerobic microbes that consume carbon monoxide and hydrogen and produce ethanol. Because the process uses specially bred strains of microbes, they produce ethanol exclusively, unlike other fermentation processes, which often produce a range of alcohols and which require further distillation. Furthermore, the flexibility of the Coskata process allows for other microbes to be used in the same process setup (or even a parallel setup). Other strains of microbes that produce other useful alcohols, including some used as precursors for plastic production, so that the same technology could be used in other applications to provide a petroleum replacement.

Terra preta (or agrichar, as it is also sometimes called) is not a new concept, but it is probably unfamiliar to most readers. The term terra preta refers to rich black soils found in the Amazon. These soils are not natural, but were human-made, produced by the civilizations living in the region before the arrival of Western settlers. The terra preta has a high level of nutrients, with three times

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