When people talk about the automobile “going green,” they are generally talking about improvements to the internal combustion engine and new lighter materials, which, in combination, squeeze more mileage and less pollution out of burning petroleum.
Of course, the battery an electric car gets avoids the on-board combustion process, but it brings with it its own problems of limited range and clean versus dirty electricity generation.
I’ve argued in this column that clean, bio-based liquid fuels play a much bigger role in the solution. Let’s continue our tour of the bio-fuels today by looking at the possibilities of fuelling our cars with clean-burning ethanol from the garbage dump.
Ethanol is the quickest and easiest route to cut way down on our reliance on petroleum-based gasoline. Put ethanol in the “gas” tank in some combination with the nasty stuff and you’re going “green” in a big way. In fact, you have some ethanol in your gas tank now (about 5 per cent) because it’s “mandated” by the government.
We could take the 5 per cent up to 85 per cent quickly with minor tweaks to new cars and, of course, lots and lots of ethanol.
Most ethanol is grain alcohol, exactly the same stuff as in booze, and is produced in North America from corn. Arguments against the stuff as fuel is that it requires more energy than it produces and that it is taking food away from a hungry world. Both those arguments are bunk and believe I have proven so in previous columns.
Alright, corn can’t do it all, but who would object if we produced the vast quantities of ethanol we need from good, old garbage?
That’s the promise of cellulosic ethanol. Cellulose is the non-food carbohydrate that forms the cell wall in most plants – trees, grass, corn, whatever. What an endless source of the stuff we have in our garbage stream.
Once you take out the recyclables – mostly metals – you’ve got cellulose aplenty. Tear down a house – more cellulose. Gather up wood chips and bark at a mill, collect agricultural waste, plant switch grass or miscanthus (grasses) on land that won’t grow anything else – and cellulose will never be in short supply.
My explanations are a trifle on the simplified side – consider the source – but there are basically two ways to turn cellulose into ethanol. There’s the biological approach and the thermo-chemical approach.
The biological approach uses using enzymes to break cellulose into simple sugars and then it’s fermented and distilled. The thermo-chemical approach starts with heat to transform the cellulose into carbon monoxide and hydrogen. The process is called gasification and it’s been around for more than 100 years. These gases are then converted to ethanol by fermentation or chemical catalysis.
The biological approach is followed by companies like the much-touted Iogen in Ottawa that has so far failed to deliver the large-scale plant it has long talked about. The thermo-chemical approach is taken by companies including Enerkem in Sherbrooke, Que. Enerkem’s co-founder, Dr. Esteban Chornet, has tweaked and massaged and optimized this fairly straightforward process in a thousand ways over a 40-year period.
Michael Dennis.
This brings us to the next character in the tale, Michael Dennis. Dennis is known to Torontonians who were around during that brief, golden period known as the Crombie Years when the development direction of inner city Toronto was changed for the better. Dennis was Mayor David Crombie’s housing and development guru.
Dennis later went on to run Olympia & York’s development activities in New York (World Financial Centre) then went to London to direct Canary Wharf, which was at the time the largest privately owned commercial development project in the world. It ended in bankruptcy in the stagflation of the late 1980s.
Since then, Dennis has kept his hand in the real estate industry and spent part of a decade attempting to commercialize the biological approach to cellulosic ethanol. To put it bluntly, it didn’t work. So about five years ago, he switched over to the thermo-chemical approach when he came upon Enerkem. He’s an investor and is now chairman of the privately owned company.
Back to the ethanol from garbage story – this time it might actually work.
Enerkem has been around since 2000 and operates a little pilot plant in Sherbrooke and a larger commercial plant in Westbury, Que., where it converts the remains of old, toxic, creosote-soaked utility poles into ethanol. But it’s getting its best chance to prove itself with the construction of a waste-to-biofuels plant this year in Edmonton.
Enerkem picked up $23-million from the governments of Alberta and the City of Edmonton and is lining up partners for the rest of the $80-million project. Also in development is a similar project in Mississippi, for which it was awarded $50-million (U.S.) from the U.S. Department of Energy.
When you’re finally driving down the Green Highway, I predict it will be with ethanol or bio-diesel in the tank. Getting the stuff from a garbage dump seems too good to be true – but it is entirely possible.
Stay tuned to Edmonton and Enerkem to see how this one turns out.
Michael Vaughan is co-host with Jeremy Cato of Car/Business, which appears Fridays at 8 p.m. on Business News Network and Saturdays at 2 p.m. on CTV.
