Startup Claims to Make $1/Gallon Ethanol 456
gnick writes to mention Wired is reporting that an Illinois startup is claiming they can make ethanol from most any organic material for around $1/gallon. Coskata, backed by General Motors and several other investors, uses a process that is bacteria based instead of some of the other available methods. The bacteria processes organic material that is fed into the reactor and secretes ethanol as a waste product.
logic (Score:1, Interesting)
What! GM backing cheap fuel! (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't know the merits of this particular deal, but it never made sense to me that "car makers" really cared one way or the other about the fuel costs (and the SUV craze has borne that out...)
But how much to consumers? (Score:1, Interesting)
OPEC Screwing Themselves (Score:3, Interesting)
for a while yet, but now everyone is gunning for them. They drove the oil prices
up too high creating the incentives to start driving innovation to help eliminate
them from our lives.
Re:stop the lies (Score:5, Interesting)
Potatoes cost $2017 per acre to produce.
Corn on the other hand $502 per acre to produce.
That is a rather large difference, corn production also requires next to no man power where
as the production of potatoes (root bound crops) is considerably higher.
Brazilian Ethanol (Score:2, Interesting)
Nevertheless, the mass cultivation of sugar cane is destroying several other agricultures, mainly in Brazil's South and Southeast regions, besides the fact that the producers and farmers usually burn the unused bagasse (crushed sugar cane) and the crops after harvests, being responsible for Brazil's high position in the rank of top polluters.
Why are we wasting our time with this? (Score:2, Interesting)
Why are we wasting our time and wasting food and alcohol?
Re:logic (Score:5, Interesting)
BTW, Pimentel still disagrees that ethanol is energy positive. He's really just being a jerk, pushing data that's nearly 30 years old. Not a single study that's independent of his numbers has shown the same results. The only problem is that there are enough gullible people who listen to him.
Re:OPEC Screwing Themselves (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:OPEC Screwing Themselves (Score:2, Interesting)
You must be new around here.
We've been gunning for them since 1974.
Re:Great, but (Score:2, Interesting)
The health of the environment must be sacrificed for some people to scrape by day to day. They work damn hard at miserable jobs just to give their children bread on the table. Life isn't easy and he resents people who want to teach lessons and force him to piss his daughter's college fund into the gas tank.
He is saying that if you don't care about the cost of oil then you are either wealthy, insensitive or just naive--mistakenly thinking that this robotic reduction of difficult problems is intelligent thought. It's easy to say that you don't want oil refineries built when you ride a schoolbus for free.
Not my words mind you...
Re:More on Butanol... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:logic (Score:3, Interesting)
The funny thing is that kudzu really is about a perfect plant. It is editable. The leaves can be eaten is a salad and the roots can be eaten as a starch like a potato. The Flowers can be made in to a jelly. It can also be used for animal feed. It is also a legume so it actually puts nitrogen back into the soil. Even more if you plow the waist back in. And it grows with no fertizer and needs no chemicals. The problem is that well it grows like a weed.
Re:logic (Score:4, Interesting)
Such as? Every recent government study I've seen says the exact opposite.
e.g. The Energy Balance of Corn Ethanol: An Update [anl.gov]:
What you're probably thinking of is sensationalist headlines like this: Study says ethanol not worth the energy [usatoday.com]
Oh lookie. David Pimentel. What a shocker.
I think you'll find that energy-negative studies not conducted by Pimentel himself invariably contain a "Special Thanks to David Pimentel for providing data." Nice, eh?
We have ethanol costing less than $1 (Score:2, Interesting)