Green Options » syngas

Coskata Unveils Next Gen Flex-Ethanol Facility In Pennsylvania

Christopher DeMorro — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 15:58:52 +0000

Today, Coskata Inc. unveiled their semi-commercial flex ethanol factory in Madison, PA. This factory will serve as the first commercially viable flex ethanol factory, which produces ethanol from a variety of feedstocks other than just grain—which is an important step to satisfy food vs. fuel issues and start moving past ethanol from corn.

According to Coskata, their process uses less than half the water needed to make a gallon of gas, while producing seven times the energy of the fossil fuel used in the process.

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Mixed Signals on Sustainable Development in Brazil?

David Hone — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 22:00:33 +0000

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post from David Hone, Climate Change Adviser for Shell.

I have been in Sao Paulo this week at Sustentavel 2009, perhaps the premiere Sustainable Development event in Brazil, if not all of South America. At the opening I represented the World Business Council for Sustainable Development and then on the first day of presentations I participated in the main climate change panel session.

What is clear is that there is a passion in Brazil for sustainability – from the huge issues they face in the Amazon region to the road congestion in Sao Paulo. Talking with delegates at Sustentavel, it is also clear that the country faces an interesting future in terms of greenhouse gas emissions.

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From Trash to Treasure: The Future of Syngas

Lisa Wojnovich — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 13:00:14 +0000

The renewable energy startup Ze-gen, Inc., has put a new spin on an old technology. Before the advent of the electric light bulb, many cities used coal gasification to provide fuel for their street lamps, and as the costs of oil and natural gas soar, many are reconsidering this old method in the hopes of providing cheaper sources of fuel. But there is a downside. Gasification works by using heat to convert solids into gas, and as we all know, burning coal tends to release large quantities of carbon dioxide, a major cause of global warming.

However, Ze-gen has come up with an alternative solution. Instead of using coal, which has numerous detrimental environmental effects, they are using garbage — waste that would otherwise be destined for landfills. For about two years now at a demonstration facility in New Bedford, Massachusetts, the company has been injecting what it terms biomass, organic waste from construction sites as well as municipal sources, into a vat of molten scrap metal.

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Gasification: Ultra-Cheap Biofuel From Any Carbon Source

Nick Chambers — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 15:15:44 +0000

Under a new research directive at Ames National Laboratory, scientists are honing in on a way to perfect a process called gasification to create cheap ethanol from almost any carbon source without fermentation.

If they’re successful, crops, agricultural waste, lawn clippings, raked leaves, sewage sludge and garbage could all be turned into ethanol using the same efficient process, in the same facility, under one roof.

We’ve covered the process of gasification for ethanol production before, but this new research appears to be a huge step forward in making ethanol using gasification.

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Coskata Pilot Plant Goes Plasma

Philip Proefrock — Sat, 03 May 2008 03:27:56 +0000

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.

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Ford’s Coal-to-Liquids Concept Vehicle: Release in 2010

Clayton B. Cornell — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 18:30:48 +0000

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.”

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More on Plasma Gasification Technology

Philip Proefrock — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 17:46:10 +0000

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.

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More About the Coskata Process

Philip Proefrock — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 12:01:58 +0000

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.

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Terra Preta for Carbon Reduction

Philip Proefrock — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 16:56:50 +0000

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 the nitrogen and phosphorus and twenty times the carbon of normal soils. But producing fertilizer is not even the most interesting part of agrichar. The agrichar process also releases gasses which can be used as fuel for electrical generation or even for powering vehicles, and, most interestingly of all, more carbon goes back to the earth than was released in the process.

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