Cars.com's visits Coskata, wonders if all this great ethanol can flow from boring surroundings
When AutoblogGreen visited Coskata's Chicago headquarters, we didn't get into details about just how ordinary (in a 21st century American suburban business park kind of way) the surrounding area looked. Cars.com's description of their visit, though, starts off by questioning whether this potential energy leader's location is fitting for such important work: ... could [Coskata] really be found in a cluster of lookalike buildings housing an advertising agency, a medical clinic and a company called Yum Brands[?]
The answer is yes, and Cars.com goes on to describe why corn ethanol is a bad idea (actually, a "much, much worse idea" than we previously thought) and then describes a bit of Coskata's cellulosic ethanol production process. This should be a recap for those of you who read our initial report on what GM and Coskata are cooking up, but if you're hungry for more viewpoints on what Coskata is all about, it's worth a read.
[Source: Kicking Tires at Cars.com]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
stevejust 3:29PM (2/18/2008)
Yum brands is the parent company of such little known companies as: Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, A&W and Long John Silver's. Who ever heard of them?
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Karen Pease 5:46PM (2/18/2008)
This tech sounds remarkably similar to "thermal depolymerization", the only real difference being that they're producing ethanol instead of gasoline. Not sure *why* they'd want to do so, but it's what they're doing.
In case anyone here doesn't remember the whole TDP story, they created a process in which any sort of carbon-bearing waste (tires was a classic example there, too) could be turned into very pure petroleum products with whatever chain length they desired. They managed to have 85% of the energy of the inputs end up in the outputs, which is probably way better than this input->syngas->microbes->ethanol process described here. They were predicting the production of what was effectively light sweet crude at at something like $20-30/barrel.
Reality wasn't so kind to them. Their "free" feedstock of turkey waste (expected to cost them nothing because of the mad cow scare) ended up not being free when regulations ended up not banning it from going into cattle feed. This added an extra $15-20/barrel to the costs. Combined with other unexpected costs, the ultimate price was about $80/barrel; only thanks to subsidy have they managed to turn a profit.
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BGJ 6:43AM (2/19/2008)
If the starting point is syngas, why go through the effort of turning that into ethanol? Why not just make synthetic gasoline? Is this more expensive or difficult?
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