Date: January 17, 2008

Author: Eric Kroh

Source: Medill Reports

A west suburban company plans to turn municipal garbage into next-generation ethanol for a production cost of under $1 per gallon.

That translates into a pump cost of 50 cents to $1 under current gasoline prices, according to company estimates.

But the best part is that the seemingly limitless supply of municipal garbage promises an energy source that could potentially eliminate America's dependence on foreign oil.

“It’s here. It’s not about five years. It’s about now. We’re not waiting. It’s sitting in front of us today,” said Wes Bolsen, vice president of business development at Warrenville-based Coskata Inc.

Coskata announced earlier this week that they are partnering with General Motors Corp. to bring the technology to market. If successful, the venture would solve many of the problems plaguing the ethanol industry.

The process turns wood chips, garden waste -  even old tires - into ethanol in two minutes flat. There are no byproducts except water, which is recycled. One ton of dry input yields 100 gallons of ethanol, which is much more efficient that any other means of producing ethanol. The company will include agricultural byproducts such as corn stalks as part of the raw material.

In addition, the Coskata process produces 84 percent less greenhouse gas than gasoline production, and uses 89 percent less fossil fuel, according to May Wu, an environmental scientist at Argonne National Laboratory.

Commercial production of the company's ethanol formula will begin later this year, with the goal of producing 100 million gallons of ethanol nationwide annually by 2010. Its aspirations, though, are much bigger.

The U.S. has the potential to produce 1 billion tons of biomass per year including garbage and agricultural crops and waste, according to a study by the Department of Agriculture. Feed all this into the Coskata process and you wind up with 100 billion gallons of ethanol produced annually. The U.S. consumes about 140 billion gallons of fuel annually.

While ethanol must be blended with at least 15 percent gasoline to be used in automobiles at present, American oil provides that much gasoline.

“You could truly eliminate dependence on foreign oil,” Bolsen said.

The process involves a unique hybrid of technologies that have been around for years. At the front end is a gasification process that heats materials to 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit, turning them into carbon monoxide, hydrogen and carbon dioxide, collectively known as “syngas.”

This gas is then fed to a hungry breed of engineered organisms that eat carbon monoxide and hydrogen and produce ethanol as a byproduct. Bolsen likened the unique appetite of the organisms to kids who eat French fries and broccoli at the same time.

The resulting mixture of ethanol and water is separated in the next step and then the water is recycled. Altogether, less than one gallon of water is used to produce each gallon of ethanol, compared with 3-4 gallons of water used in corn ethanol production and 44 gallons consumed in gasoline production. The process requires about 50 percent of the overall energy used in traditional methods of ethanol production.

“There’s no invention here. This is innovation,” Bolsen said. “We’ve taken the best pieces from multiple different areas.”

In the best-case scenario, the process yields nearly eight units of energy for every unit of non-renewable energy put into the system, according to studies done at Argonne National Laboratory. Using a “well-to-wheels” analysis, researchers at Argonne took into account all aspects of fuel production, including fossil fuel input, crop production, electricity and natural gas.

By comparison, gasoline production only yields about 0.84 units of energy for every unit of non-renewable energy input. In other words, it takes more energy to make it than you get from it.

Also, converting municipal waste into ethanol would mean that states like Texas, New York, California and Florida would be able to produce their own ethanol, instead of having it shipped expensively from the Midwest.

The energy bill signed by President Bush in December mandates that 21 billion gallons of renewable fuel from non-food sources be produced by 2022.

“It’s gonna take a lot of people to solve this issue,” Bolsen said. Partnerships with major corporations like GM, as well as the further development of technology, could make Coskata’s goals a reality, he said.

“Our technology will go out, we will partner with people. We’re gonna partner with those people to make hundreds of millions and billions of gallons of fuel.”