Gas 2.0

If you spent any time as a child in the 80’s, you probably spent a more than a few afternoons longing for your own flying DeLorean, hover-board, and Marty McFly Nikes.

Unfortunately, you still can’t have any of those things (although the Nikes did appear on eBay, briefly, and sold for $1300 US), but maybe you can have something better:  a real, honest-to-goodness Mr. Fusion!

The “Mr. Fusion” reactor mounted to the back of Back to the Future’s famous DeLorean hovercar produced the car’s fuel by extracting chemical energy from common household garbage.  While the 1985 movie version of Mr. Fusion put out enough power to juice the good Doctor Brown’s flux capacitor all the way to the year 2015, the 2008 version will probably only get a few miles down the road.

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Under a new research directive at Ames National Laboratory, scientists are honing in on a way to perfect a process called gasification to create cheap ethanol from almost any carbon source without fermentation.

If they’re successful, crops, agricultural waste, lawn clippings, raked leaves, sewage sludge and garbage could all be turned into ethanol using the same efficient process, in the same facility, under one roof.

We’ve covered the process of gasification for ethanol production before, but this new research appears to be a huge step forward in making ethanol using gasification.

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Photo Credits: deborah sherman photography

The Cafe Racer Truck Runs on 100% Recycled Coffee Grounds

A commenter on Ben’s wood-powered truck post pointed us to a similar car hack. The truck above is also powered by a wood gas generator, except this one runs on coffee grounds. The Cafe Racer is a 1975 GMC pickup that essentially burns up used coffee to create a combustible gas. The gas is filtered on its way to the engine and, Viola, a caffeine-powered truck. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve heard of making fuel from wood before, but rarely does using wood as fuel come up. However, just today I was pointed to this site, hosted by a local radio station, with a real-life example of someone burning wood as a fuel in his truck.

I can’t say for sure how the system works, whether it’s dual fuel or the wood-burning supplies all the fuel the engine needs, but it doesn’t appear to be a hoax and is certainly interesting. Evidently, during WWII, there was some experimenting with alternative fuels (due to shortages caused by the war), and one of the results was the wood burning automobile. Read the rest of this entry »

Ford Motor company announced today it would be offering a new range of alternative-fuel vehicles by early 2010, powered by what some think is the US’s only hope for energy independence: coal.

Ford says that it will be converting the massive amount of empty storage space found on their larger trucks into mobile coal-storage and processing containers:

“We’ve done some serious research on coal—since it will be the 21st century’s predominant fuel—and we’ve come up with some interesting results. For example, in extensive polling, we found that American’s don’t really care which fuel they use, as long as it’s cheap. Coal is by far the cheapest source of domestic energy we’ve got. Second, we also found that 98% of the bed space in our large trucks goes unused about 100% of the time. So, we just put two and two together.”

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With all the writing we’ve done recently about the Coskata partnership with GM, and the unique process the company’s created to make ethanol from almost any material containing carbon, you might think we’re getting paid to cover this. That’s not the case, of course; rather, this news points to some really exciting new directions in ethanol development. We’ve got some more posts up on Coskata… but not here at Gas 2.0…

Today, we rolled out the newest member of the Green Options Media blog network, CleanTechnica. Both lead writer Sarah Lozanova, and our publisher, David Anderson, “baptized” our new clean technology blog by sharing what they learned on a tour of Coskata’s facility in the Chicago suburbs. Team member Michelle Bennett also dug into a topic we’ll cover frequently there: solar panels (specifically, cheap and free ones).

While there may be a little bit of topical overlap between these two blogs, we’ll tend to keep alternative fuels developments here at Gas 2.0, while other clean tech stories will appear at CleanTechnica. We hope you’ll make both blogs a part of your daily reading, and that you’ll let us know how we’re doing on both.

Plasma gasification has the potential to be a breakthrough technology. It can serve not only as a method of producing fuels, but also as a method for effectively dealing with hazardous wastes. In fact, the technology was initially developed to be a method for waste disposal, and the energy production potential was just a side benefit.

Plasma gasification was one of the more exotic methods that was discussed as a precursor for the Coskata process for ethanol production. Coskata’s method takes a stream of carbon monoxide and hydrogen (known as syngas) and feeds it through a bioreactor vessel where specialized strains of bacteria feed on the syngas and metabolize it to produce ethanol (or other alcohols, depending on the strain of bacteria in the reactor). There are numerous methods for producing syngas, some more than a century old, but others, such as the plasma gasification method, sound like the stuff of science fiction. Read the rest of this entry »

As you’ve almost certainly already heard by now, General Motors has announced a partnership with Coskata, Inc. to produce ethanol less expensively and without using food materials as feedstock for the process. This is exciting for a number of reasons. First of all, Coskata is close to completing a continuous demonstration stream at their laboratory. They also expect to have a pilot demonstration plant in place by the end of the year that will produce 40,000 gallons of ethanol. And later this year, they expect to announce the site for their first full-scale plant which will be capable of annual production of 100 million gallons of ethanol. The process also consumes less water resources (less than one gallon of water per gallon of ethanol produced) and delivers 7.7 units of energy per unit of energy used in the process.

The process relies on using anaerobic microbes that consume carbon monoxide and hydrogen and produce ethanol. Because the process uses specially bred strains of microbes, they produce ethanol exclusively, unlike other fermentation processes, which often produce a range of alcohols and which require further distillation. Furthermore, the flexibility of the Coskata process allows for other microbes to be used in the same process setup (or even a parallel setup). Other strains of microbes that produce other useful alcohols, including some used as precursors for plastic production, so that the same technology could be used in other applications to provide a petroleum replacement.

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LIVE FROM DETROIT AUTO SHOW: GM ANNOUNCES PARTNERSHIP WITH BIO-BASED ETHANOL PRODUCER COSKATA BIOFUELS TO RAPIDLY COMMERCIALIZE AND DISTRIBUTE ETHANOL FOR FLEXFUEL VEHICLES.

At noon today, General Motors announced an undisclosed equity share in Coskata, Inc., a renewable energy company with the means to produce low-cost ethanol from virtually any carbon-containing feedstock including biomass, municipal solid waste—even used car tires. GM believes Coskata has the premier technology for rapidly implementing ethanol production technology worldwide. Click here for a video of the announcement.

GM already has a vested interested in ethanol, with 2.5 million FlexFuel model vehicles already on the road (15 models planned for 2009), and plans to make half their fleet ethanol-ready by 2012. The partnership is a win-win situation as Bill Roe, President and CEO of Coskata puts it: “GM is enabling Coskata to produce the next generation of biofuels - without using a food source - making it economically viable and commercially available.”

GM will test Coskata’s ethanol at the Milford Proving Grounds by late 2008, followed by completion of a 40,000 gallon per year commercial demonstration facility by the end of the year. A larger, 100 million gallon per year facility is currently being sited for construction in the U.S.

Coskata claims it can produce ethanol for under $1.00 per gallon from almost any carbon-containing feedstock, while reducing greenhouse gas emission by 84% compared to gasoline, using only 1 gallon of water for each gallon ethanol produced, and returning 7.7 times as much energy as is used in the production process.

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