

Startup Says It Can Make Ethanol for $1 a Gallon, and Without Corn - rms
http://www.wired.com/cars/energy/news/2008/01/ethanol23

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hugh
Interesting technology. There's no reason why it shouldn't work, and if it
does, it'll be great.

But the numbers in the article don't quite seem to work out. The first
"commercial-scale" plant in 2011 will only make 100,000 gallons a year.
Assuming they make it for $1 a gallon in raw materials and sell it for $3 a
gallon, you've still got a chemical plant whose gross profit is barely enough
to employ two people. Is that really "commercial scale"?

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rms
Yeah... I saw that too. Sounds more like a test scale production, or someone
forgot two zeros. Wired seems to be slipping lately; there was an article they
published that said you can get a whole human genome sequenced today for
$10,000 which is very wrong. And if it's not wrong, I want to know where.
[http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/01/synthe...](http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/01/synthetic_genome?currentPage=2)

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hugh
OK, I googled "coskata 2011", and all other sources say they're planning to
make 50-100 _million_ gallons a year by 2011, which makes much more sense.

For what it's worth, the total US consumption of gasoline is about 140 billion
gallons a year.

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Tichy
So it makes sense that they'll singlehandedly take over 70% of the gasoline
consumption of the US within 3 years? Without applying any mathematical tricks
or bayesian reasoning or whatever, I'd say off the top of my head that that is
very unlikely.

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niall
0.07% seems more reasonable...

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Tichy
oh damn, billion and million... ;-)

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Tichy
It doesn't sound so revolutionary when they mention that current processes
cost only 1,40$ a gallon. Also, to claim "it does not interfer with food
production because it does not need corn" seems plain wrong. Whatever plant
they'll be using will be taking away space that could otherwise have been used
for growing food.

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hugh
Yes, but there's a lot of marginal semi-arid land out there which is no good
for producing crops, but fine for producing something like the switchgrass
they're thinking of using.

~~~
hugh
Oh yeah, and also (replying to myself here) you can use the waste products
which you get from crop production anyway -- e.g. the stalks and leaves -- so
it can work in parallel with food production.

That stuff currently has negative value -- farmers will pay you to take it off
their land.

