According to Chris Vander Doelen of Canada.com, General Motors has purchased a small stake in a company that has pioneered a novel approach to producing ethanol for fuel.

Update: Wow, this has been covered by a whole slew of media outlets! See here. I guess Canada.com was the only one that made my news feed for some reason.

Coskata, a Warrenville, Illinois-based company, has patented a process that uses two very simple concepts to convert many forms of waste (wood, tires, paper, food waste, bagasse and other agricultural byproducts, etc.) into alcohol suitable for fuels. The company claims that the process produces very little solid waste and consumes very little energy to produce a viable ethanol product.

I’ve studied the website, and I must say that if this process can be scaled up to a size suitable for mass production of ethanol, I may change my stance on E85. Current ethanol plants are energy hogs themselves, requiring huge amounts of carbon-based fuel consumption to distill ethanol that can be burned in an internal combustion engine. They are also moisture hogs, requiring a very large amount of water. Finally, the current technologies are feed-stock dependent, meaning that a plant built for biomass and agricultural wastes can’t produce ethanol from a different feed stock without significant modifications. The Coskata process seems to reduce those negatives.

The Coskata process is relatively simple: gasify all incoming feedstock using efficient high-temperature gas plasma ‘gasifiers’, use existing scubber technology to remove unwanted gases from the process, feed the raw ’syngas’ (synthesized gas) into a reactor filled with a population of proprietary microorganisms that ferment the hydrocarbons into ethanol, condense and separate the resulting ethanol/water mixture and thus, you have a production stream of ethanol. Byproducts include high-energy syngas that can be used as a natural gas substitute to satisfy the energy needs of the production facility and high-temperature water which is fed back into the process for energy efficiency. A small amount of solid waste is produced when using “dirty” feedstocks like coal and tires.

What I especially like about this process is that all of the technology has been in use in various applications for years. Hydrocarbon gasification for easy use of solid fuels was developed 50 years ago or more. Syngas is a primary product of the huge oil sands operation in Northern Alberta, Canada and has been in production in the lignite fields of North Dakota, United States for some 20 years. And every alcohol production process separates water from alcohol to concentrate the final product. Thus, the properties are well known and should be reliable enough.

Obviously, the development hinges on the “proprietary micro organisms” that ferment the syngas into ethanol.

Per the Coskata website:

Coskata microorganisms are extremely efficient, utilizing the entire energy value of available input material to produce ethanol. This is a significant advantage over other approaches that only use a fraction of this energy due to their inability to utilize all portions of biomass input material and/or result in non-ethanol byproducts hurting efficiencies.

Coskata states, rightly so, that the current state-of-the-art ethanol refining technologies require the use of chemical catalysts that are only efficient with consistent (single-source), clean plant feedstock and under artificial conditions (very high hydrogen levels and high temperatures). This is the portion of the current technology that I have problems with: high energy consumption, lack of flexibility and intensive capital investment.

As I’ve said before: I think that GM is pretty serious about this ethanol thing. They are certainly putting their money where their mouth is.

I hope that this process leads to better, less costly, more acceptable ethanol production. It’s just one more option to make things more renewable.

It should also put the Saab BioPower in the forefront of GM’s marketing campaigns of the future. A great side benefit of being a part of the General.