Waste not, want not: gassing up from garbage in US

 

Matthew L Wald

 

   After years of false starts, a new industry selling motor fuel made from waste is getting a big push in the United States, with the first commercial sales possible within months.
   Many companies have announced plans to build plants that would take in material like wood chips, garbage or crop waste and turn out motor fuels. About 28 small plants are in advanced planning, under construction or, in a handful of cases, already up and running in test mode.
   For decades scientists have known it was possible to convert waste to fuel, but in an era of cheap oil, it made little sense. With oil now trading around $125 a barrel and gasoline above $4 a gallon, the potential economics of a waste-to-fuel industry have shifted radically, setting off a frenzy to be first to market.
   “I think American innovation is going to come up with the solution,” said Prabhakar Nair, research chief for UOP, a company working on the problem.
   Success is far from assured, however. Some of the latest announcements come from small companies whose dreams may be bigger than their bank accounts. They are counting on billions in taxpayer subsidies. Big technological hurdles remain, and even if they can be solved, no one is sure what unintended consequences will emerge or what it will really cost to produce this type of fuel.
   “We desperately need it, and I personally think it’s not there yet,” said Steven Chu, director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a Nobel Prizewinning physicist. “You have to look at starts with a grain of salt, especially starts where they say, ‘It’s around the corner, and by the way, can you pay half the bill?’ ”
   At Solazyme, a start-up in South San Francisco that hopes to commercialize a process for making fuel from algae, President Harrison F Dillon said, “When we founded the company in 2003, we couldn’t find a venture capital firm that had heard of the concept of a biofuel.” Now he is backed by two such firms.
   One of the first companies to bring a plant online is KL Process Design Group, in Wyoming. NYT NEWS SERVICE

 

FUEL THROTTLE: Pine waste is used to make ethanol, a substitute for gasoline, in Upton, Wyoming