This is one of the coolest green processes I've seen yet:
A customer of ours came in from the east coast today. They are buying some essential equipment for an ethanol plant to be built out there.
One of the biggest criticisms of ethanol has been that it requires so much energy to create it and relies on feed stocks in many cases. A lot of the plants built and being built in the midwest and corn belt are fired on natural gas.
Bio-diesel, on the other hand, is self-sustaining since their reaction process is fired by bio-diesel. At this time, ethanol-fired power burners are not practical for industry.
Anyhow, 60% of the necessary fuel needed at this ethanol plant will be provided by landfill methane gas at an adjacent landfill site. The remainder will be propane. The also have a reclaimation process for capturing the CO2 produced in their processes and it will be used for various useful purposes.
Instead of using corn for the starches to make alcohol, they are using a tall grass being developed in India which has 10 times the essential starch content and will still have some protiens which might be useful in feedstocks or other products. They can get three harvests a year off the grass and there is, as I understand, no need to re-seed. The grass will be grown in close proximity to the plant to minimize transportation cost and energy consumption.
Too cool not to share.
I think most "green" folk realize using corn to make ethanol is not a long term solution. There is only so much land viable to grow corn and it is already too valuable to make ethanol practical without a 50 cent PER GALLON government payoff.
Switch grass or India's Elephant grasses are probably going to be the ticket. Things that grow REALLY fast by taking nitrogen and carbon out of the air and can grow with low water on crappy soil. Many parts of Oklahoma would be excellent for growing such fair as an alternative to their cotton crop.
And yes, using natural gas to make alternative fuels (as well as diesel to farm the crops and transport them) seems a bit counter productive. Nice little tidbit though, and an excellent secondary market for Tulsa's oil infrastructure manufacturers.
Oh, ps. Tulsa based Syntroleum successfully turned coal into military grade jet fuel yesterday (in TN).
http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20071108005881&newsLang=en
Add to that the tower plant for wind energy and Tulsa has a nice base of alternative energy companies to build off of. I hope they market that.
AFAIK, all that remains operational of Syntroleum in Tulsa is the corporate HQ. They completed their processes at the Tulsa pilot plants last year and are trying to find buyers for their equipment here. For certain, the location off east pine is being parted out or sold off in it's entirety (it was only a 3bbl/day plant). I was just out there earlier this week picking up some equipment we bought from them. It's amazing the amount of equipment that was necessary to make 126 gallons of oil per day.
My understanding is that Syntroleum is more-or-less licensing their technology to others now and won't actually be in the large-scale production. That still brings revenue to Tulsa, but it's not necessarily going to be a job market boom.
The profitability of their process also hinges on the relative prices between natural gas and coal and oil. They developed two processes, the coal to oil and the other is to convert natural gas to oil, which would be practical to re-capture NG in places like the North Slope and liquefy it as a light grade oil to get it to other places around the globe. (The cost of pipelining NG from Alaska would be astronomical).
The only way the NG/oil process makes sense is where you have an abundant supply of NG at the well-head and you don't have to pay a utility for it.
Well let me know if I should ever unload the 1500 shares of SYNM that I bought a while back. I think its on a good long term run, no matter where their production is. Heck, NVDA mostly leases their technology and they do just fine.
quote:
Originally posted by cannon_fodder
Well let me know if I should ever unload the 1500 shares of SYNM that I bought a while back. I think its on a good long term run, no matter where their production is. Heck, NVDA mostly leases their technology and they do just fine.
That's the beauty of licensing out the technology, it puts the bulk of overhead and risk on the actual producer. Sit back and watch your stock grow on the intellectual property you invested in. [;)]