Fulcrum's Durham facility shows solid-waste-to-ethanol works

http://www.techjournalsouth.com/news/article.html?item_id=8084

It says the plant, set for completion in 2011, could produce ethanol for $1 a gallon.

The company's technolopgy turnes municipal solid waste into synthetic gas, then converts the gas to ethanol.

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The company says that after its first commercial plant begins production, it wants to develop additional facilities across the U.S. and has already signed feedstock contracts that would allow it to make 1 billion gallons of ethanol annually.

That would drop the cost to about 50 cents a gallon if the company had 20 plants online.
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No problems with supply of "feedstock"!

(years ago, the guy who used to write Lil' Abner had a piece about a guy who ran his car on self generated methane. A visionary he was.)

fulcrum-bioenergy says a plant can produce 10.5 million gallons of ethanol from 90,000 tons of solid waste.

90,000 tons of MSW into 10.5 million gallons of ethanol per year.

And the U.S. produces 250 million tons (of solid waste) per year. If my math is right, that would be a potential for the U.S. of about 29 Billion gallons of ethanol. Quite a bit, about 21% of the total volume of transportation fuel used in 2008.

...and put it in your agricultural processes. In essence you would be growing food for fuel.

But you'd be eating it first!

To each his or her own, I guess.

...and used for a variety of purposes. The hydroponic formula is rather simple.

(i.e., will it still contain anything useful for fertilizer or anything?)

K & R anyway as it seems to be a good move. :thumbsup:

In fact, the leftover waste would be perfect for compost, conceptually. Would be nice to see if this works as stated.

There are about a thousand better things to make, unless of course, one merely is a car CULTist with an obesession.

Ethanol is corrosive, not suitable for pipelines, toxic, http://homepage.mac.com/oscura/ctd/incidents.html">dangerous, and miscible with water.

Thus far, except the acrylic acid Eastman plant in Tennessee, very few syn gas plants have remained commercially viable.

The feedstock for that plant is considerably more homogenous.

A few years back here, I'd guess 4 to 5 years ago, we heard all about the Changing World turkey guts to oil plant that was suppose to um, change the world.

It didn't.

You can be a "renewables will save us" car CULTist on this website without soothsaying. They can't construct a post, or even a sentance "could."

With Changing World it was "could" make oil for $10/barrell.

Appears to have been bullshit, doesn't it?

Everyday we have "solar could be competitive by..." or "wind could meet all of our energy needs..." or "ethanol could eliminate a brazillion barrels of oil..." year after year after year after year after year.

You get the impression that not one of these "could" statements is made by a person who has ever opened a science book.

I personally do not think that we're going to be doing ourselves any favors going all electric with heavy lithium batteries. I still consider liquid (high energy) fuels the way to go.

Ethonal has more energy density than lithium by a factor of 30.

achieve significant (20% - 30%) reductions of GHGs. Plus electric cars limit will be about 40% to 60% (assuming increased efficiency over the next decades) reductions in gasoline usage and GHGs emissions from transportation. Plugins and pure Electric cars will be limited to about 80% of the light vehicle fleet which is about 80% of the total fleet. That means they will potentially could replace about 64% of the entire fleet (it's possible plugins and electrics may not be cost advantageous for larger light vehicles over conventional hybrids using inertia to recharge a lighter battery pack..this depends upon how efficient these batteries can become.).

The thing is you can replace the fuel (gasoline) faster than you can replace the cars that burn the fuel. We should also import Ethanol from Mexico ( Mexico says they could meet all the U.S. 2022 goal for ethanol themselves(!) using Agaves. This is important as we need to get more GHG reductions in the next several years or reductions in 20 years won't make any difference - it will be too late.

Ethanol is a high octane fuel (E85 = 105) which means it can produce more power under high compression than gasoline. (this is why just compring ethanol to gasoline only on a BTU content basis is nonsense - if we are really interested in reducing GHG emissions from autos and trucks.) MIT scientists designed an Ethanol enabled direct injection engine which achieves 30% improvement in fuel consumption over a gasoline engine of similar power - while using only about 5% ethanol and 95% gasoline! Ford formed a company with these MIT professors to make this engine. It will cost $600 to $1,000 more than a standard ICE engine.

Ford is making it available in it's high end Lincoln MkX model. It should become available in cheaper models but we need more E85 pumps around the country to make it more interesting for the car manufacturers.

The engine is scalable from small cars to large trucks so it's feasible for any vehicle on the road. If all the cars were using this engine you would achieve a 30% reduction in gasoline consumption using a volume of ethanol equal to only 5% of the total fuel supply. (any additinal ethanol would be used to replace gasoline directly adding to that 30% reduction). That's what high octane fuel and super-charging or turbo-charging can do for you - IF the GOVERNMENT WOULD GET BEHIND THIS OPTIMIZATION OF ETHANOL WITH A MAJOR PUSH TO INCREASE THE NUMBER OF E85 PUMPS AROUND THE COUNTRY. This is necessary to interest the auto manufacturers to make this engine available in more cars and in large numbers.

Ethanol won't solve the problem of global warming by itself but it is an important tool in that effort.