Garbage = BioFuel
Tuesday, September 29th, 2009
The Next Fuel Source
We have followed this development in biofuels for years. The MixAlco process we identified in 2006 as less expensive than corn ethanol plus it doesn’t compete with food because it is not agriculturally based.
The new energy company Terrabon uses the MixAlco process to convert garbage collected by their partner Waste Managment and converts it to a mix of alcohols that have the same power density as gasoline.
Ordinary bacteria found in salt marshes quickly and economically break down waste streams as diverse as municipal solid waste, farm residue and timber waste to form carboxylic acids. What good are carboxylic acids you ask? Well, these acids which include acetic acid (vinegar) can be easily converted into ketones and alcohols. The final products include high power density fuels that pack more punch than ethanol. Better yet, the fuel generated can interface with existing refineries and pipelines without modification.
From Technology Review:
Amid a profusion of new biofuels technologies, this one stands out because it will be relatively easy to scale up for producing millions of gallons of fuel, says James McMillan, the biochemical process R&D group manager at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, CO.
Most biofuels companies fall into one of two categories. Some use enzymes to break down biomass into simple sugars and a single organism to convert sugars into fuel, such as yeast. Others use high temperatures and pressure to break biomass down into basic chemical building blocks–carbon monoxide and hydrogen–which are then chemically processed into fuels. Terrabon has developed a process that combines the two. It uses a naturally occurring mixture of organisms to convert biomass, not into fuels, but into carboxylic acids. These can be converted into fuel and other chemicals using well-known chemical processes. Gary Luce, the company’s CEO, says Terrabon’s fuels can compete with petroleum-based fuels if prices are above $75 a barrel. (The price of oil is currently about $70 a barrel.)
The approach has an advantage over single-organism-based methods because the mixture of organisms used, collected from salt marshes, are adapted to survive in the wild. They don’t require the special sterile environments needed to prevent single-organism cultures from being contaminated, which brings down the cost of equipment.
More at TR
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