AZEqualizer
01-26-2008, 10:27 AM
John McElroy on Autoblog.com (http://www.autoblog.com/2008/01/26/autoline-on-autoblog-with-john-mcelroy/) has this interesting article.
GM is teaming up with a company called Coskata (http://www.coskataenergy.com/partners.html) that's come up with a breakthrough to make cellulosic ethanol.The big difference between their effort and everyone else's. Coskata's process goes way beyond using switch grass. It can use any kind of agricultural waste. Even more importantly, it can use a lot of municipal waste, i.e., most the stuff we're dumping into landfills. In fact, it can use anything that has carbon in it, including used tires.
Just to make sure everything's on the up and up, the Argonne National Laboratory analyzed Coskata's process. It says that for every unit of energy used to make this ethanol, it will generate up to 7.7 times that amount of energy. On a well-to-wheel analysis, it reduces CO2 emissions by up to 84% compared with gasoline. Coskata's process also uses less than a gallon of water to make a gallon of ethanol compared to three gallons or more for other processes.
And here's the best news of all. GM and Coskata say they can produce a gallon of this ethanol for less than $1 a gallon. They'll have a pilot plant up and running by the end of the year, and the plan is to go into mass production by 2011.
http://www.coskataenergy.com/images/process_homepg.jpg (http://www.coskataenergy.com/process.html)
GM is teaming up with a company called Coskata (http://www.coskataenergy.com/partners.html) that's come up with a breakthrough to make cellulosic ethanol.The big difference between their effort and everyone else's. Coskata's process goes way beyond using switch grass. It can use any kind of agricultural waste. Even more importantly, it can use a lot of municipal waste, i.e., most the stuff we're dumping into landfills. In fact, it can use anything that has carbon in it, including used tires.
Just to make sure everything's on the up and up, the Argonne National Laboratory analyzed Coskata's process. It says that for every unit of energy used to make this ethanol, it will generate up to 7.7 times that amount of energy. On a well-to-wheel analysis, it reduces CO2 emissions by up to 84% compared with gasoline. Coskata's process also uses less than a gallon of water to make a gallon of ethanol compared to three gallons or more for other processes.
And here's the best news of all. GM and Coskata say they can produce a gallon of this ethanol for less than $1 a gallon. They'll have a pilot plant up and running by the end of the year, and the plan is to go into mass production by 2011.
http://www.coskataenergy.com/images/process_homepg.jpg (http://www.coskataenergy.com/process.html)