Great scott Marty! GM’s making fuel out of trash for less than $1/gallon!

by Kris   ⋅   January 14, 2008   ⋅   Comment now   ⋅    RSS

When you saw Doc Brown in Back to the Future II “gassing up” his time-traveling DeLorean with banana peels and garbage, didn’t you think “wow, what a great idea! Why doesn’t someone get on making that a reality?” GM execs must’ve thought that, too.

General Motors, close to being toppled as the world’s top-selling automobile company by hybrid-honey Toyota, is investing in Coskata (a year-old company with only 37 employees at present) who can churn trash into cellulosic ethanol for as low as 50 cents per gallon. Coskata’s patented bacteria and bioreactors (developed at Oklahoma Universities) can efficiently turn any carbon-based waste material (even grody ‘ol farm waste) into cheap alternative fuel. For example, four tires = seven gallons of ethanol, two bales of hay = five gallons.

If successful, this will be a great leap for the environment as well as the consumer pocket book. Besides being a possible solution to landfill scarcity, cellulosic ethanol is said to produce 85-90% less greenhouse emissions than gasoline, corn-based ethanol only drops the threat by 20-30%. Corn-based ethanol is also more costly to produce at about $1.50/gallon.

Not surprisingly, E85 (the term meaning a vehicle can burn up to 85% ethanol) is a great way for GM to cut corners while remaining compliant with Federal fuel-economy standards. Gas-electric hybrids, the darling of Asian manufacturers like the Toyota Prius, costs production factories thousands of dollars to modify, while making a vehicle E85 compatible costs GM less than $100.

Coskata will build its 40,000 gallon/year plant by the end of this year, leading up to a 100 million gallon/year facility by 2011. This coincides with GM’s promise to increase flex-fuel vehicle production to 80,000 cars by 2010, leading to half of the entire production line by 2012. GM CEO Rick Wagoner also hopes to increase availability of E85 filling stations across the nation. Currently, there are only 1400 ethanol pumps out of 170,000 nationwide gas stations.

On a side note, GM also has been working on a hydrogen-powered Cadillac concept car called Provoq.

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