BobinCA

Cellulosic Ethanol: The Next Biofuel Boom?

If you look at the number of landfills in this country alone that have been filled and consider that new places for landfills are becoming extremely hard to come by (e.g. Los Angeles trying to get the Eagle Mountain open-pit iron mine for a landfill), it seems to me that garbage is one thing we won't be running out of anytime soon. Places to put garbage, yes. Garbage itself, no.

What will you do with your compost? What problems will that solve? Bluefire's technology, if it can be scaled, reduces what goes into landfills, extracts methane from the existing landfill to use for a heat source (methane is a much worse GHG than CO2), produces usable transport fuel, partially powers itself from the leftover lignin, and hopefully makes money in the process. All without burning fossil fuels. Obviously, it remains to be seen if that latter criterion (making money) can be met, but the pilot plant that has been operating in Japan has been slowly scaled up and is still working well. The Japanese results were known when DoE gave Bluefire the grant.

It should be noted that this process will also work with any other cellulose-based feedstock, such as wood chips (the Japanese plant runs on wood), switchgrass, etc.

Finally, "lowest cost" isn't necessarily required. Lower cost than gasoline (taking into consideration the difference in energy content) is all that's necessary, since no one source can provide all the fuel we'll need. That's why I think this may be viable regardless of what others do. We're going to need every drop of ethanol/methanol/butan... we can get our hands on, and making fuel out of trash or other waste doesn't impact food supplies or land needs.

I don't own any stock in this company, but I am thinking of buying some.

On Jul 11 02:57 AM CCHanderson wrote:

> I believe ethanol production requires a more consistent product than
> yard and vegetative waste to produce a reliable product at the lowest
> cost.
>
> I think a better alternative would be to require landfills to operate
> a public compost operation that could then be reused in the community.
> Some places already have this in the US but it does not seem to be
> going mainstream.