Garbage to Ethanol

[GumboYaYa]

Check out this article from CNET: http://www.news.com/8301-11128_3-9939613-54.html?tag=blog.1.

This is my new venture and the reason I have not been on DU much the past several months. I haven't been able to say much about our technology since we are a public company and much of the information is confidential, but this article tells the basic story.

We take curbside garbage and convert it into ethanol. We are using technology developed at the University of California Berkeley, Purdue University and University of Alabama Huntsville. The system is a three step process where we clean and separate the cellulose from the garbage, convert the cellulose into a mixture of ammonium nitrate, pentose and hexose sugars, and then ferment that into ethyl alcohol.

There isn't enough waste to solve the entire energy problem in the country, but we hope to be a significant part of the solution while simultaneously helping deal with the growing waste disposal problem in the country

[End Of The Road]

1. Fabulous!

Would this solve our landfill problems, or are there types of things that would still go there?

[GumboYaYa]

2. We think that the technology will reduce the amount of garbage currently going

into landfills by 85% to 95%. Garbage varies greatly by municipality, so the actual amount will vary by location.

The material that goes to the landfill is almost all inert. We are able to remove and treat a large amount of the VOCs in the garbage at the early stages of the process.

It is really exciting to be working with this technology.

Here is a link to our website www.cleantechbiofuels.net

[End Of The Road]

3. Best of luck to you

This sounds like a great "part" to the solution, and it certainly makes me more excited than corn.

Edited to add: Generating trash is something we Americans do very well.

[phantom power]

6. what are VOCs?

[truedelphi]

8. Volatile Organic Compounds as opposed to hydrocarbons.

For instance, formaldehyde is a VOC - very carcinogenic. Benzene, toluene, and I think ether is also one. Rarther nasty stuff for the nervous system.

But unfortuantely what our EPA has focused on has been the hydrocarbon side of polution - carbon monoxide, cabon dioxide etc. When the public needs both the Hydrocarbons and the VOCs eliminated.

[GumboYaYa]

11. Exactly right....

[Trillo]

4. It beats the heck out of putting it in landfills!

Thanks for the info.

[Fledermaus]

5. Very good, people will pay you to come and get your feed stock

[IndyOp]

7. How much energy is used to convert the garbage into ethanol?

How much CO2 is released from a combustion engine that burns ethanol?

Garbage to ethanol gets us off of foreign oil and keeps us from depleting food supplies, but does it significantly reduce global warming gases?

[GumboYaYa]

12. The process is highly efficient.

It displaces existing fuel from oil and gas. Currently the cellulose in garbage converts to methane in landfills. The methane is either released into the atmosphere where it is a far worse greenhouse gas than CO2 or it is burned, which release all sorts of nasty pollutants into the atmosphere. Neither is a good result.

[eppur_se_muova]

9. What was the technology developed at UAH?

I grew up in H'ville, might move back there. Didn't know anyone there had been involved in something like this.

(More technical: Any chance of making butanol instead of/as well as ethanol?)

[GumboYaYa]

13. The process for cleaning andseparating garbage was developed

at Huntsville.

It may be possible to produce Butanol also.

[Fledermaus]

17. Nothing really new with ethanol

The first attempt at commercializing a process for ethanol from cellulose was done in Germany in 1898

Using trash as a feed stock is relatively novel. People will pay to have their trash/feed stock piked up.

Cellulose is just part of the carbon cycle. I'm quite sure there are other carbon compounds in trash that can be used.

Overview
The main concepts we are trying to get across in this section concern how energy moves through an ecosystem. If you can understand this, you are in good shape, because then you have an idea of how ecosystems are balanced, how they may be affected by human activities, and how pollutants will move through an ecosystem. If you had Biology 101, this should be review; if you had Geology 101, this is new stuff. Either way, it is pretty basic and you shouldn't have much trouble reading this material or the associated material in the text.

Roles of Organisms
Organisms can be either producers or consumers in terms of energy flow through an ecosystem. Producers convert energy from the environment into carbon bonds, such as those found in the sugar glucose. Plants are the most obvious examples of producers; plants take energy from sunlight and use it to convert carbon dioxide into glucose (or other sugars). Algae and cyanobacteria are also photosynthetic producers, like plants. Other producers include bacteria living around deep-sea vents. These bacteria take energy from chemicals coming from the Earth's interior and use it to make sugars. Other bacteria living deep underground can also produce sugars from such inorganic sources. Another word for producers is autotrophs.

Consumers get their energy from the carbon bonds made by the producers. Another word for a consumer is a heterotroph. Based on what they eat, we can distinguish between 4 types of heterotrophs:

consumer trophic level food source

Herbivores primary plants

Carnivores secondary or higher animals

Omnivores all levels plants & animals

Detritivores --------------- detritus



A trophic level refers to the organisms position in the food chain. Autotrophs are at the base. Organisms that eat autotrophs are called herbivores or primary consumers. An organism that eats herbivores is a carnivore and a secondary consumer. A carnivore which eats a carnivore which eats a herbivore is a tertiary consumer, and so on. It is important to note that many animals do not specialize in their diets. Omnivores (such as humans) eat both animals and plants. Further, except for some specialists, most carnivores don't limit their diet to organisms of only one trophic level. Frogs, for instance, don't discriminate between herbivorous and carnivorous bugs in their diet. If it's the right size, and moving at the right distance, chances are the frog will eat it. It's not as if the frog has brain cells to waste wondering if it's going to mess up the food chain by being a secondary consumer one minute and a quaternary consumer the next.

The diagram above shows how both energy and inorganic nutrients flow through the ecosystem. We need to define some terminology first. Energy "flows" through the ecosystem in the form of carbon-carbon bonds. When respiration occurs, the carbon-carbon bonds are broken and the carbon is combined with oxygen to form carbon dioxide. This process releases the energy, which is either used by the organism (to move its muscles, digest food, excrete wastes, think, etc.) or the energy may be lost as heat. The dark arrows represent the movement of this energy. Note that all energy comes from the sun, and that the ultimate fate of all energy in ecosystems is to be lost as heat. Energy does not recycle!!

The other component shown in the diagram are the inorganic nutrients. They are inorganic because they do not contain carbon-carbon bonds. These inorganic nutrients include the phosphorous in your teeth, bones, and cellular membranes; the nitrogen in your amino acids (the building blocks of protein); and the iron in your blood (to name just a few of the inorganic nutrients). The movement of the inorganic nutrients is represented by the open arrows. Note that the autotrophs obtain these inorganic nutrients from the inorganic nutrient pool, which is usually the soil or water surrounding the plants or algae. These inorganic nutrients are passed from organism to organism as one organism is consumed by another. Ultimately, all organisms die and become detritus, food for the decomposers. At this stage, the last of the energy is extracted (and lost as heat) and the inorganic nutrients are returned to the soil or water to be taken up again. The inorganic nutrients are recycled, the energy is not.

Many of us, when we hear the word "nutrient" immediately think of calories and the carbon-carbon bonds that hold the caloric energy. IT IS VERY IMPORTANT that you be careful in your use of the word nutrient in this sense. When writing about energy flow and inorganic nutrient flow in an ecosystem, you must be clear as to what you are referring. Unmodified by "inorganic" or "organic", the word "nutrient" can leave your reader unsure of what you mean. This is one case in which the scientific meaning of a word is very dependent on its context. Another example would be the word "respiration", which to the layperson usually refers to "breathing", but which means "the extraction of energy from carbon-carbon bonds at the cellular level" to most scientists (except those scientists studying breathing, who use respiration in the lay sense).

To summarize: In the flow of energy and inorganic nutrients through the ecosystem, a few generalizations can be made:

The ultimate source of energy (for most ecosystems) is the sun
The ultimate fate of energy in ecosystems is for it to be lost as heat.
Energy and nutrients are passed from organism to organism through the food chain as one organism eats another.
Decomposers remove the last energy from the remains of organisms.
Inorganic nutrients are cycled, energy is not.

http://www.marietta.edu/~biol/102/ecosystem.html

[GumboYaYa]

19. That is correct...the technology to hydrolyze cellulose with concentrated acid

has been in existence a long time. None of the technology was commercially feasible with $1.00 - $2.00 per gallon gas. Now there are lots of technologies like ours that can be commercialized if we develop them. We do believe that we have made improvements to the prior technology that makes our system much easier to commercialize than prior technology. Principally, we use nitric acid to hydrolyze biomass instead of sulfuric acid (which is the basis for the prior technology). We believe that here are a myriad of advantages to using nitric acid over other acids tat have been used for hydrolysis.

The use of trash as the feed source is unique.

Additionally, new technology is being developed to enhance the fermentation process. Cellulose produces C5 and C6 sugars. Corn and other food crops produce only C6 sugars. Naturally occurring yeasts will ferment the C6 sugars, but can not ferment the C5 sugars. New recombinant yeasts are being developed to ferment both the C5 and C6 sugars. This is new technology that will enhance the efficiency of the prior technology.

[ramapo]

10. What about mining existing landfills?

There is a big pile of garbage in the Jersey Meadowlands. It's my understanding that once covered, there is little decomposition that occurs. Aside from being interesting archeological sites, might the dumps offer any mining opportunities?

[GumboYaYa]

14. The cellulose in existing landfills is largely decomposed, so it is not

as good of a source for cellulose.

[truedelphi]

16. Thanks for explaining that.

And thanks for this great topic.

I cannot understand why over the past 20 years, there has been so little comment by M$M (until maybe this year) about the awfulness of our oil use.

But the media has been on the awfulness of the corn to ethanol approach like a fly on stink.

Is the corn to ethanol the right approach? Not exactly - as we have seen this year. There is really no need to take food out of the mouth's of people and put it into our gas tanks. But already the real energy science people are saying - Look, we goofed. So let's change the approach. We will just use the cob, the husks etc in the future.

I really feel that M$M is helping the oil industry put the kabosh on ethanol. But I don't think the consumers are going to stand for it. "When the people lead, the leaders follow!"

[poopfuel]

15. hey gumboyaya

When you get a chance, you should check out my friend's book. Might have info you can use.

Thanks.
http://www.alcoholcanbeagas.com?bid=2&aid=CD8&opt=

[JohnWxy]

18. THIS is terrific. IT's great to hear from someone who is actually making things happen.

While others argue we should only focus on what might be the "ultimate solution" to fossil fuel usage and global warming there are those like you who are working on technologies that will make a difference in the shorter run. As you said, they may not solve the problem entirely, but it's a start. It's so important to get going with things that will work now as well as researching longer term approaches, since sometimes the more challenging approaches take longer to bring to a practical reality than is anticipated). While others argue about who's got the "ultimate solution/salvation" will be, people like you are actually getting things done and moving us closer to where we want to be (less fossil fuel consumption and less GHG emissions)!

I wish you great success. You ought to get a medal. YOu've got my respect and admiration.

YOu may know about this already but in case you don't, Ford is teaming with a few MIT researchers who designed an ethanol enabled direct injection engine which will acheive 25% to 30% reduction in gasoline consumption. This is possible because ethanol's high octane (113) enables a higher compression (accomplished through turbo-charging) than is possible with gasoline and achieves a higher power output per cubic-inch. So the engine can be downsized by about half! Ford and the MIT people have formed a start-up (Ethanol Boosting Systems, LLC (EBS))to mass produce these engines by 2011. Ford expects these engines to cost about $1,000 when mass produced.

These engines only use 5% ethanol and 95% gasoline. What this means is if all the cars and light trucks were using these engines we would reduce our total gasoline consumption by 25-30% with a suppply of ethanol only equivalent to 5% of the total transportation fuel suppply. In the light of this development the 8 billion gallons of ethanol ("Estimates are that the U.S. could produce 8 billion gallons of ethanol from waste, according to Coskata's Bolsen") mentioned in the article a lot more significant in terms of its impact on gas consumption and GHG reduction. (Actually we probably will be producing roughly that amount of ethanol in 2 to 3 years. Just in time for the arrival of the ethanol direct injection engine!)

So when you start producing ethanol you will be contributing more to alleviating the problem than you might have realized.

THanks for the post and for your work!

recommended!

[poopfuel]

20. more on garbage, landfill, methane conversion

Here

http://www.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUSN1230791320080521?sp=true