A common comment at events where Bioroot Energy has presented is that our business vision to turn municipal waste and biomass into clean, green transportation fuel sounds too good to be true.
Fact is, the core technologies Bioroot Energy seeks to deploy are already proven. It’s a plasma gasifier, connected to a gas to liquid (methanol) plant. Making a proprietary alcohol fuel formula that is already EPA approved but has not yet been commercialized. Making a cleaner, stronger fuel which will not only compete directly with corn ethanol, but ultimately prove vastly superior as an oxygenate fuel.
The technology is ready to turn on nationally. What isn’t ready? The American people. We’ve been throwing away trash and burning biomass since the day our forebears stepped off the boat onto Plymouth Rock. And burning coal and oil without much awareness of what it does to the environment.
How much longer is this dirty, wasteful and unhealthy practice going to serve us? Today America sits on its heels, dug in, refusing to invest locally in better technologies even as the nation’s energy, economic and environmental indicators glow red. The government can’t build these technologies, it’s up to the private sector.
photo: Johan Spanner for The New York Times
There’s a reason Europe leads the USA in converting its waste and biomass to energy. Given the never-ending quest for efficiencies which pervades European life due to the higher costs of energy and greater population densities, it’s easy to understand why Europe leads the USA in this case. They simply have to!
America can do “waste to energy” better. For example, Bioroot Energy is not seeking to build high-tech incinerators like those being brought online in western Europe. While these new incinerators are much cleaner than any incinerator in the United States, they’re not clean enough.
What’s more, the single product they produce, electricity, isn’t the product we will be making because it isn’t the primary type of product the current transportation fuels market needs, which is better and dramatically cleaner liquid fuels.
We seek to build non-polluting energy creation and waste processing infrastructure based on gasification, not incineration.
There is a big difference in the two technologies.
Too good to be true? We don’t think so.
Source: New York Times article
