Startup Says It Can Make Ethanol for $1 a Gallon, and Without Corn

Posted by James Bowery on February 06, 2008, 08:06 PM | #

We’re waiting on an article from Maguire critiquing that system.

Posted by Svyatoslav Igorevich on February 06, 2008, 08:35 PM | #

Drat, I actually read that thread and that post and forgot about it!

Posted by jrackell on February 06, 2008, 11:03 PM | #

A short critique from Robert Rapier on the process here:

http://i-r-squared.blogspot.com/search?q=coskata

Posted by stari_momak on February 07, 2008, 12:00 PM | #

Mike Sura is awful fair-skinned for an Indian, or awful round-eyed for a Chinese. But he must be one of those, as heaven knows we can’t develop any technology without them to help and guide us.

Posted by James Bowery on February 07, 2008, 04:56 PM | #

Not to worry, stari_momak.  Here is a founder of Coskata and its chief science officer:

Dr. Rathin Datta
Chief Scientific Officer, Founder

And anyway, the venture capital came from Vinod Khosla:

Shown here with one of the early Apollo workstations.

Oh, wait.. did I say “Apollo” workstations?

I meant Sun workstations…

I can’t imagine how I made that mistake.  I’m certain that Khosla’s prior employment at Apollo did not give him access to critical intellectual property then used by Sun.  No… It’s too horrible to contemplate… It can’t have happened that way…

Posted by Fr. John on February 09, 2008, 10:34 AM | #

So, they want to make fuel for $1 a gallon, yet want to HOLD THE PROCESS, and then ‘sell’ fuel at $1 a gallon cheaper than currently. That would mean roughly $2 a gallon, a 100% markup.

Yet they would have a monopoly over a ‘National service’- for transport is not an ‘option’ in this day and age, but a necessity.

How about a government buy out, with the technology being applied to INDIVIDUAL UNITS for household use?

If ANYTHING would work, what about our own personal refuse in a small unit, that would allow US to make ‘gas’ ourselves? Or is ethanol just as flammable, and dangerous as gasoline? If so, WHY?

Why not work to make it as safe as most household chemicals, and finally BReAK the dependance on a monopoly at price gouging? If we all want to be ‘fair’ and ‘inclusive’ you see…...

All I can see is that we would trade Arab oil for Indian corn, as it were…..
Same masters, different hue.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on February 09, 2008, 11:31 AM | #

“what about our own personal refuse in a small unit, that would allow US to make ‘gas’ ourselves?”  (—Fr. John)

“Backyard self-sufficiency” obviously isn’t for everyone but I remember seeing a program on TV maybe seven or eight years ago featuring a Swiss farmer who got enough methane from his farm compost heap to bottle for powering all his vehicles including his family’s private car which he converted to run on bottled gas, PLUS lots to spare, to sell at a nice cash profit.  I vaguely remember shots of this big compost heap with pipes running through and around it leading into some kind of collector/compressor device adjacent.  I garden and have always kept a garden compost heap.  This guy’s was big but not what I would call humongous — maybe ten or fifteen times the size of mine.  What was ungainly and awkward-looking was not the heap but all the collector pipes running through it.

Another story:  the father of a guy I know, one of these rural farm-bred New England types with not more than a high-school education if that, who can tinker/engineer/mill anything on earth and have it up and working better than the chairman of the MIT engineering department, got hold of a discarded small piece of electric generating equipment — paid nothing for it; it had literally been thrown away and he came, saw it, and carted it home — and rigged it for water power, and installed it in a small stream running through his property.  Now that right there is pretty complicated stuff but some of these tenth-generation rural folk around here are wizards at this kind of thing.  That generator generated all his home’s electric needs PLUS power to spare which he sold back to the power-company grid at a profit!  (Not only no more electric bills but you now get a small semi-regular check from the power company!)  All it required was minimal maintenance and an overhaul now and then.  The little stream of flowing water he put it in was maybe five or six foot wide.

Posted by Svyatoslav Igorevich on February 09, 2008, 01:18 PM | #

About hydro, anybody know a good primer page for dummies?  Do you basically need a varied topology in addition to a water source (i.e., a good slope to give it head)?  Or can you hook up hydro to a river or stream in a flat area and get good results?

Posted by GT on February 09, 2008, 02:12 PM | #

SI,

Head is required.

As to a primer, check the vocational education resources I posted yesterday.

Posted by GT on February 09, 2008, 02:20 PM | #

Hydropower
http://www.usace.army.mil/publications/eng-manuals/em1110-2-1701/toc.htm

Posted by Svyatoslav Igorevich on February 09, 2008, 08:13 PM | #

Thanks GT, I just came here to search for your homesteading stuff and saw your links.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on March 01, 2008, 07:57 PM | #

“I remember seeing a program on TV maybe seven or eight years ago featuring a Swiss farmer who got enough methane from his farm compost heap to bottle for powering all his vehicles including his family’s private car which he converted to run on bottled gas, PLUS lots to spare, to sell at a nice cash profit.”  (—my comment above)

And I just ran across this again, from “Finn”:

P.S.  One of my relatives in the [Finnish] countryside has built a bio-gas reactor [producing methane].  Cheap to build, something over 10,000 euros.  Turns cow manure or almost any biological substance into fuel by rotting it in an oxygen-free environment.  He gets all his home-heating fuel, electricity, and fuel for his car from it, and sells the excess methane gas.  Inexpensive alterations of cars enable them to run on methane.  The residual composted biomass [known simply as compost, which is all it is:  the methane gas is produced and escapes anyway, whether or not you collect it:  all garden compost heaps produce it] has advantages over normal manure as farm fertilizer:  it gives more nutrients to the soil, weed seeds are killed [because compost heaps generate internal temperatures high enough to damage them], cows get fewer stomach sicknesses [from grazing on pasture spread with composted mixed biomass compared to manure].  His neighbors bring him their biowaste.  They get rid of it.  My relative turns it to gas and sells it to the neighbours.  Speed loader of gas is twenty to thirty times more expensive than slow loader (Car tank loading: speed loader/2-3 minutes ; slow loader/5 hours).  The exact price I didn’t ask, but the speed loader is profitable, and a necessary purchase for all who want to sell methane.  It is also worth considering becoming a manufacturer and seller of these bio-gas reactors.

Posted by a Finn on Tuesday, June 26, 2007 at 03:32 AM | #

Posted by Fred Scrooby on June 22, 2008, 07:10 PM | #

A step up from the methane-from-your-own-backyard-compost-heap strategy:  here‘s the complete package, a guy in central New Jersey (where the winters can get quite cold — I lived there for one year) who gets all his home and vehicular energy needs free.

By the way, here‘s something that hasn’t been mentioned in this blog’s threads yet, I don’t think, as an energy source (we’ve talked about ethanol, fusion power, and other stuff, but not this):  microwave-beamed energy from geostationary-orbit satellites capturing sunlight in space photovoltaically.  Japan’s working on a satellite they hope to have up by 2030 which “will transmit one gigawatt of energy to Earth, equivalent to the output of a large nuclear power plant.  The energy would be sent to the surface in microwave or laser form, where it would be converted into electricity for commercial power grids or stored in the form of hydrogen.”  The U.S. is starting to dust off older plans for doing the same thing, plans developed decades ago during the era of ultra-cheap oil and left on the shelf for that reason — cheap oil.  But no more:  “The recent spike in energy prices has rekindled interest.  In a feasibility study released last October, the U.S. National Security Space Office urged that the U.S. immediately develop space solar power systems.  It noted that, ‘A single kilometer-wide band of geosynchronous Earth orbit experiences enough solar flux in one year to nearly equal the amount of energy contained within all known recoverable conventional oil reserves on Earth today.’ ”  Think of that:  a single satellite with an energy output equal to “a large nuclear power plant.”  And that’s what’s projected for a first-generation satellite of this variety.  This energy-gathering method would seem to have truly enormous potential.

Posted by Lurker on June 23, 2008, 12:08 AM | #

Fred - I know thats something (power from space) that Jerry Pournelle has been pushing for years. I seem to remember as a kid reading about it in the early ‘80s

Posted by GT on June 23, 2008, 01:12 AM | #

Using photovoltaic panels to generate the electricity required to separate hydrogen from tap water is a lovely idea, Fred.  This is the problem:

“Although the device cost $500,000 to construct, and it is unlikely it will ever pay off financially (even with today’s skyrocketing oil and gas prices), the civil engineer says it is priceless in terms of what it does buy: freedom from ever paying another heating or electric bill, not to mention keeping a lid on pollution, because water is its only by-product.”

Ain’t no way the cost will come down short of a substantial government funded award to private industry, as Maguire has suggested.  That’s not likely to happen.

I also like the idea of microwave-beamed energy from geostationary-orbit satellites capturing sunlight in space photovoltaically.  Unfortunately that, too, would require a substantial government-funded award to private industry which is not likely to happen.

Why awards?  As an incentive to industry and cheaper, in the long run, than government-financed projects.

Why are they not likely to happen?  Oil profits and the need to promote energy dependency within the population.

Posted by GT on June 23, 2008, 01:40 AM | #

Racially homogenous Japan and the multiracial West have different goals. Realize that “our” government, “captains of industry,” and physically idle easy money speculators are not interested in promoting independence within the population.  The “energy crisis” will remain a “crisis.”  Continued sacrifice, Mexican quality, lower efficiencies, and increased consumer costs are the wave of the future.  Periodically one politician or another will do something to lower gasoline prices 50 cents and morons will say, “See, you’re wrong!”  But then quality will suffer, customers will become accustomed to it, and price creep will continue.  Don’t be fooled again.  There is no evading what needs to be done: Alternate industries, microcommunities, and local political engagement.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on June 24, 2008, 08:45 AM | #

A couple of discussions of electricity beamed down as microwaves from solar panels lofted into orbit and assembled into huge geostationary arrays (this is exactly what the Japs are working on right now and expect to have up and running within some twenty years):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_satellite

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_solar_power

(Of course the Japs aren’t hamstrung the way we are by a class of Euro-hating Jewish managers, political operatives, and string-pullers seeing to it that a stupendous portion of our national wealth and energy gets wasted by being sidetracked onto every Jewish scheme imaginable aimed at driving this country’s Euros down and artificially pumping up non-whites of every description, largely brought into the country by the Jews expressly for that purpose.  The Japs aren’t hamstrung by all that Jewish anti-Euro crap we are, so they can do stuff like this.)

Posted by GT on June 24, 2008, 01:02 PM | #

...seeing to it that a stupendous portion of our national wealth and energy gets wasted by being sidetracked onto every Jewish scheme imaginable aimed at driving this country’s Euros down and artificially pumping up non-whites of every description…

The jews’ sycophantic, speculating monetarist allies of gentile persuasion are a part of this scheme as well.  Identify the jew and his gentile allies on the “left” and “right.”

“National Energy Independence” does not mean lower energy costs for consumers.  Microwave-beamed energy and improved battery technology are not cures for high consumer prices – not even partial cures.  Energy is a need.  Consumer wage-slavin’ and needs dependency are regime goals.  Any price reductions will be temporary, at best.  Increases in energy prices are inevitable, both direct and indirect.  One way or another, consumers will pay the new energy toll.

The only reliable sources of energy independence available at this time are found in the countryside.  Yes, that means windpower, hydropower, and producer gas for steam-driven electrical turbines.  It also means social interaction, cooperation with neighbors, and local political engagement – from microcommunity foundations.  It also means contributing your share of physical work to common needs at the end of the workday.  It means turning Europid nationalism on this continent into a a positive and productive force.

Posted by .357 on June 24, 2008, 09:41 PM | #

“The jews’ sycophantic, speculating monetarist allies of gentile persuasion are a part of this scheme as well.  Identify the jew and his gentile allies on the “left” and “right.”

GT,

Question: I’m just wondering…... Do you think, Mitt Romney, (whom I think is a class act) is a sycophant to the Jewish agenda?

If so, why?