Houston Company Makes Gasoline out of Lawn Waste (We may have a true winner here)

DailyTech ^ | July 14, 2009 10:56 AM | Jason Mick

[Freeport]

Biofuels are a controversial topic. Some support switching to using natural gas (primarily methane), a substance that is in great abundance in America. Others, particularly corn farmers and the U.S. Department of Agriculture suggest switching to an ethanol-based economy. Still others advocate using sugar cane in more limited ethanol or biodiesel deployments.

All of these approaches, though, share fundamental inefficiencies -- they require a car engine redesign to full take advantage of them. Modern dual mode vehicles can lose 15 percent or more efficiency.

Houston, Texas-based Terrabon believes they have the answer. They have refined and improved on a Texas A&M University acid fermentation called MixAlco, which can convert "anything that rots" (including lawn waste) into a gasoline-like substance. The company has built a $3.5M USD Energy Independence I facility to test the process. Malcolm McNeill, Terrabon’s chief financial officer states, "One of the reasons we built this was to find out what we didn’t know."

By the end of the summer the facility will be using chopped sorghum (a fast growing plant), to produce 300 gallons per day (7.14 barrels of gas). While that might not seem like much, that's over 2,500 barrels of gasoline over the next year.

Terrabon plans to soon open a larger plant in Port Arthur, Texas, with the help of San Antonio’s Valero Energy Corp. The company believes it can produce $1.75/gallon gas at the facility.

The company's plans are boosted by the 2007 Energy Law, signed by President Bush, which promises 36 billion gallons of biofuels to be used by 2022. Oil from algae and processes like Terrabon's seems the most promising mid-term solution (along with cellulosic ethanol). However, the company still faces tough challenges ahead as the ethanol industry is the favorite child of the biofuels world...

[Freeport]

So here's a possible process that we can directly generate an heptane / isooctane (gasoline) mixture directly from a vat of cellulosic...

Bring on the crab grass!

[onedoug]

Too much potential. Zero will shut it down.

[Charles Martel]

Put some kudzu in your tank! (talk about your “renewable resources”...)

[MortMan]

Do they have a comparison of the fuel created to fuel used (transporting the lawn waste)?

Note: I’m not being a stick in the mud, but rather trying to be reasonably sceptical.

[DuncanWaring]

Someone else made the same claim about turkey guts six years ago.

Anything Into Oil.

Appears to have gone nowhere.

[TexGuy]

Gig’em Ags! ...

[crusty old prospector]

Unless they grow their vegetation on site, it is too expensive to drive people’s yards clippings to their refinery and make a profit.

[truthandlife]

Remember, when something sounds too good to be true, it usually is.

Remember, ethanol was going to save the world...

[Freeport]

Good point.

But think of it the other way around. Instead of trucking the current gasoline process anywhere from 10 - several hundred miles by truck, The local converter plant is 5 - 10 miles away.

Which just happens to be the typical range between most towns east of the Mississippi...

[Leftism is Mentally Deranged]

I understand that cow manure can be used to produce methane. Does that apply to the bull variety too? if so, all we have to do is stand by the doors of both houses of congress and the White House with shovels and our energy problem is solved.

[A message]

Bring on the crab grass!

I could make a fortune as a crab grass supplier.

[visualops]

Crab grass? Sorghum? Use the Kudzu, please!!

[visualops]

LOL just saw your post, GMTA!

[reagan_fanatic]

Forget about it - if there’s any emission out of the tailpipe other than distilled water, the environuts will kill it before it even gets off the ground.

[visualops]

The comments at the site are a must-read LOL

[Freeport]

A follow up: Terrabon MixAlco

From the site:

Through an advanced bio-refining technology, MixAlco converts materials such as municipal solid waste, sewage sludge, forest product residues and non-edible energy crops into a wide array of chemicals and secondary alcohols that can be further refined through separate, well-established processes to produce renewable gasoline, jet fuel or diesel. The gasoline produced through the MixAlco technology is not ethanol. In fact, it has a higher energy value than ethanol and can be blended directly with gasoline produced from hydrocarbons.

[Elderberry]

At least in the cities, lawn wastes are already being transported as so many people don’t compost.

[MrEdd]

“Lawn waste” ?

Why would you not be mulching to replenish your soil?
Everything should already be going back.

[MortMan]

Historically speaking, NIMBY will prevent having such a distributed network of plants.

I hope I’m wrong, but that’s the precedent.

[Mr. Peabody]

Back to burning trees for fuel! Brilliant!

[HereInTheHeartland]

“Unless they grow their vegetation on site, it is too expensive to drive people’s yards clippings to their refinery and make a profit.”

This looks to me like the critical hole in this type of fuel source.
Here in the Midwest, there are a lot of cornstalks available in the fall. But they have to be baled and hauled to a plant somewhere.
Then you have to dispose of the spent corn stalks after they have been processed and fermented.

[Anitius Severinus Boethius]

No, it works. People just complained about the smell and local regulators keep preventing expansion.

The most creative use of that technology would be to rid a city of solid waste in order to produce oil, minerals and distilled water. Get rid of sewage and produce power? A win on both accounts.

But it will take more time to get it working. This company is a big red flag for all of those “green” companies who have an idea which works, but not at a commercial level yet.

Even with a working, profitable site, Changing World Technologies still hasn’t been able to get a second site approved and built in the U.S.

[Wonder Warthog]

"Unless they grow their vegetation on site, it is too expensive to drive people’s yards clippings to their refinery and make a profit."

You've got it backwards. You put the refinery where the city landfill is. I've often wondered why big cities with major garbage disposal problems weren't gasifying the waste. There is a LOT of fuel value in "trash".

[Terry Mross]

So, now instead of paying my lawn guy to mow my lawn, he will pay me for the grass and sell it to Valero.

[Daisyjane69]

How about let’s not burn up a world food source anymore.

“Can’t you just picture God in heaven, looking down on us? He must be saying, “Listen, you losers. I put your energy IN the ground, so it doesn’t bother anyone. I put it UNDER the coasts, so it’s out of the way. I hid some of it BENEATH the ice, so I’d know Sarah would keep an eye on it. I also put it INSIDE your rocks, so even if you missed My first 9302 clues, at least you would break your neck on it, while walking through the parks. I figured a few broken bones might get your attention. But no...........And then (as a last resort) I gave you the recipe for nuclear power, and provided the ingredients to MAKE it! You people are hopeless. Lots of luck.”

Any of these turkeys ever heard of switchgrass?

[Rebelbase]

They’ll just mandate everyone must bag their clippings and set them out for pick up on garbage day. The expense doesn’t matter, they’ll just pass it along to the taxpayer.

[Charles Martel]

GMTA!

Yep, but you must admit that it *does* seem kinda obvious. Hell, the stuff is covering huge portions of the southern states. Barns, billboards, fences, slow-moving cows - all tangled in that green mess.

If they won't process it into fuel, there's an alternative. According to Alton Brown, the leaves are edible. Just don't pick them from near a roadway where herbicide may have been sprayed (as if anything short of Agent Orange would make kudzu flinch). Something to keep in mind, if times turn really tough.

[calex59]

Hey, can I get a home distillery so that I can make my own gas? I know we can’t but wouldn’t that just pi** a whole bunch of liberals off if someone came up with a way to make gas at home out of lawn clippings? I bet inside of two weeks we would see a bill making growing a lawn illegal!

[Entrepreneur]

Gig’em Ags! ...

Whoop!

[rightly_dividing]

Actually, a few years ago someone produced a cook book for Kudzu. It had jams, jellies, sauces, salads, etc. It might could still be found online.

[DuncanWaring]

I had heard that CWT’s problem was in turning a profit, even at the high prices for petroleum over the last few years.

Apparently those who produced the waste that became CWT’s feedstock jacked up their price once they saw something useful could be done with it.

Made no sense; there’s lots of waste that currently has to be thrown away - salmonella-contaminated recalled food, plastic water bottles, pine-beetle-killed trees, CAFO manure, and so on.

[nuke rocketeer]

Yeah right! Just like the processes that promised to make diesel out of turkey crap, saw grass, and other bio-wastes, this one will not pan out either. These are all net energy losers and therefore will always be nore expensive to oil based products. If they truly lived up to their promises, we’d be independent of foreign oil

[China Clipper]

Yeah right! Just like the processes that promised to make diesel out of turkey crap, saw grass, and other bio-wastes, this one will not pan out either. These are all net energy losers and therefore will always be nore expensive to oil based products. If they truly lived up to their promises, we’d be independent of foreign oil...

Heheh, pretty soon we'll be hearing about robots that find and process biowastes. In fact, they will probably be military robots that operate on the battlefield. And, BTW, since they are battlefield robots, they will probably "utilize" animal and human corpses, since there will be so much of that on the battlefield..

Yuck!

Who would ever have dreamed about that? I mean, unless you were a Sci-Fi movie writer or producer or something. Now THAT is so unrealistic....(shudder) Imagine if THOSE robots went wacky.....Wow!!

[crusty old prospector]

But what about all of the evil fertilizer and pesticide residues in the clippings? We will all have to have “organic” yards. Because of fire ants, my yard would be classified as a Superfund site.

[Rebelbase]

Nah,the ants in grass clippings provide higher octane.

[Rockingham]

This is a development of the MixAlco process of anaerobic fermentation to generate mixed primary and secondary alcohols. Further processing apparently converts them to something similar to conventional gasoline.

[crusty old prospector]

No, I am talking about all of the pesticides and Round-up to kill crab grass, etc.....

[Wonder Warthog]

"But what about all of the evil fertilizer and pesticide residues in the clippings?"

Fertilizer is just another oxidant, and pesticide residues are just more carbon in a gasifier. Zero problem from either.

[kevkrom]

Someone else made the same claim about turkey guts six years ago. Anything Into Oil. Appears to have gone nowhere.

Actually, the process works. The issues they ran into were:

1) Environmental -- right or wrong, local residents complained about foul (no pun intedned) odors coming from the plant, and

2) Cost -- they had expected in the wake of "mad cow" issues that the feedstock would essentially be waste that would not cost them anything, but restrictions on feeding animal parts back to animals never happened. Additionally, they were never able to get the language changed that would have allowed them to claim biofuel tax credits.

[Mopp4]

The company believes it can produce $1.75/gallon gas at the facility.,

Is that with or without taxes ???

[ConservativeMan55]

bttt

[visualops]

That’s how the crap got here.
The Japanese cultivate and eat it like spinach.
When you see it climbing every telephone pole and swarming over fields like a jungle, it’s kinda hard to work up an appetite though.

[wildbill]

We got a guy in Webster, TX makin fuel out of cooking oil from fast food joints.

Only prolem is that dogs keep chasing the cars because of the smell of hamburgers that wafts behind them.

He’ was hoping that changing to old oil from fish joints like Long John Silvers would take care of the problem, but now its cats on the fast track.

[Condor51]

'Houston Company Makes Gasoline out of Lawn Waste'

Whoop-dee-do. No Big deal.

I made a Cold Fusion Reactor out of an old Bookcase, some Bicycle parts, an Alternator from a '77 Chevy Monza Mirage (305 V8), a Starter Solenoid from a '68 Buick, and a lot of Electrical Tape.

The Cold Fusion Reactor was the only solution to generating the 1.21 gigawatts of power required for the Flux Capacitor I made so I can Time Travel. (who says Necessity isn't the Mother of Invention?)

Another upside of having the Reactor is I won't have to worry about recharging the new Gubmint Motors Electric Clown Cars that'll be mandatory in a couple years.