Synthetic gasoline? Syndiesel from coal? Oil-based fuels from algae, grasses or waste grease? Single alcohols like ethanol? What about higher mixed alcohol fuels?
Evidence of fossil energy pollution might be over our heads, but it’s still everybody’s problem in need of a solution.
Ready for shift to hit the fan from all directions?
Warmer winters, hotter summers, more volatile weather, drought and retreating glaciers, etc. And rising energy prices to go along with rising emissions and sea levels. Ready for increasingly expensive change? Every product or service with an energy cost (what doesn’t?) will cost more.
Ready to be disappointed by elected leaders and big energy businesses who’d rather hold the nation back than propel it forward?
Government can scarcely put fingers in the dykes to hold back the flood of debt that threatens the foundation of our country, and some say, the global economy. So the government isn’t go be much help in the world of clean renewable energy.
Renewable energy is the energy that people produce from local resources, community-scale commitments, and astute business leadership.
America’s troubling economic issues and world environmental problems are tied directly to fossil energy use, emissions and supply – price volatility. Our nation’s near total reliance on fossil energy. Yours, mine, everyone’s dependence, except the few fortunates who’ve cut fossil-fuel ties via solar, geothermal, wind, and biofuels.
But America isn’t really out of ways to change the game with renewables—especially when it comes to producing clean, renewable fuels. In fact, America hasn’t even begun to tap into the promise of true next-generation fuels such as Envirolene®!
Here’s the viable, profitable clean fuel replacement for gasoline, diesel and corn ethanol. Here’s the fuel that rivals gasoline and diesel in power, and dominates ethanol or other single alcohols such as methanol or butanol. It’s the world’s strongest alcohol fuel. With huge price, volume, performance and emissions advantages. And this premium higher mixed alcohol fuel can be produced 24/7 in all 50 states from end of life carbons such as trash, biomass, sludge, etc. Or coal, methane and CO2.
The world is stuck on oil and coal, and the domestic gasoline supply gets a splash of corn ethanol. Oil and coal are a devil’s bargain. And so is the fact that 39 percent of America’s corn crop is dedicated to producing ethanol fuel! We can do better.
Shift To Renewable Fuel Value
Would you like to be responsible for making sure there are better days ahead for our country and the environment? Join us in developing higher mixed alcohol fuel production from America’s abundant trash, non-crop biomass, coal, and fossil gases such as methane and CO2. Let’s make lots of what America and the entire transportation world needs: clean liquid fuels.
Investment Community (Private, Institutional):
There are no bigger opportunities in clean energy than the race to fill the US Renewable Fuels Standard mandate of 36 billion gallons of clean fuels by 2022. Are you backing the right renewable liquid energy technologies? How much do you really know about biofuels? Your support for higher mixed alcohol production is a solid bet on the future of green fuels. What’s more, investment in clean fuel creation keeps these dollars in circulation where it counts: your city.
Solid and Liquid Waste Management Companies:
Don’t overlook the missing backend solution for source reduction: In the abundant and very toxic solid and liquid wastes that America hauls daily to regional landfills or incinerators are the building blocks for a cleaner liquid energy product and a cleaner planet. It is the stored energy in America’s liquid and solid wastes buried in the ground, or worse, burned to make electricity and more greenhouse gases.
Choices are few when it comes to what kinds of energy can be produced from wastes: electricity or liquid fuels. Will you produce oil-based fuels? Or will you produce a clean alcohol fuel that blends into all kinds of petroleum fuels and makes them combust more completely, lowering emissions?
Timber and Forestry:
Now more than ever , it doesn’t pay to be a logger. Especially if you have past due loans for logging equipment and not enough work because of record low demand for dimensional lumber amid the ongoing national recession. Where will this dismal outlook lead? Bankruptcy? Is there any opportunity left for loggers to salvage what’s left of their operations and start again? What market need can be met by today’s forestry industry?
Perhaps this day of reckoning will lead the forestry industry to look for a new measure of value from all types of wood and woody wastes. Beyond the board foot to the BTU, for example. Not merely from harvesting trees for dimensional lumber or wood chips, but also the needles, barks, branches, small diameter trees and slash that is traditionally piled and burned in place. Or used for making small amounts of point-source electricity using a dirty biomass boiler. That “hat trick” might make some electricity but it won’t make anyone’s equipment loan payments.
It’s time to find a use for wood and all other types of non-crop biomass that actually makes money consistently and creates jobs. Our country needs clean alternative transportation fuels. Our country is experiencing massive die off in western US and Canadian forests from beetles. There is clearly a need for the logging industry to pick up the pieces and reinvent itself.
Here’s a way forward that makes sense, and money.
Municipal, County, State, Federal Governments:
Governments across around the world are looking for new sources of revenue, and energy creation from municipal wastes and biomass is a good bet. Working with cities and towns, Bioroot Energy seeks to leverage what goes to waste in every town of any size, converting “end of life” carbons as cleanly, profitably and efficiently as possible into finished, market-ready fuel. Made from woody biomass. Municipal waste. Sewer sludge. As well as coal, methane and CO2. All of these waste and fossil carbon sources are ideal feedstocks to make lots of water soluble, biodegradable higher mixed alcohol fuel!
BE People Are Driving Change:
It’s never been more important for people on Main Street to create products the world can use. Like a clean fuel people can produce locally, sell all they can produce, create good-paying jobs, clean up solid and liquid wastes, and pay taxes on profits to local, state and federal government.
Imagine that. Main Street paying taxes on big profits from sales of a clean, renewable fuel made from trash?
This is the year shift happens. Let’s the rock the ship of state!
“It’s not a solution unless it solves your problem.”
To build a strong business in the clean energy world, you need a solution that actually solves problems. And a tireless work ethic*, a big heart, a sparkly personality, a tough hide, and a big wallet. And a lot of luck, hard work, and tough decisions to succeed. We’ve got everything but the big wallet, but we’re working on that too.
But it’s not really a money problem. It’s you. And people you know. It’s me, it’s us. We need fossil-energy users to wake up and demand that this industry clean up its act. That means you. Your friends. Your acquaintances and theirs too.
*Tireless: This CEO has been telecommuting for 14 years, and working non-stop for the past 4 years on Bioroot Energy. Mark Radosevich, co-founder of Standard Alcohol and our chief scientist, has been working for 17 years to turn on ENVIROLENE® production.
We’ve spoken to a lot of people around the world about ENVIROLENE®. From politicians and hi-tech pundits, billionaires and garden-variety millionaire industrialists, to forestry people and regular business people, and our neighbors and friends, to a simple, kind and sweet man in Conner, Montana, who lives in a teepee, chops his own wood and carries his own water, and hitchhikes wherever he needs to go.
(I give “JP” rides into town if he’s out beside the road with his thumb out when I drive by. He has a survivor story for the ages. He’s disabled and can’t drive a car, but he loves hearing about Bioroot Energy and ENVIROLENE®.)
Few have taken time to understand the technology, and as a result none have decided to back it yet.
Folks at the top are the ones who really *inspire* me. These are the people who can still afford to dream.
Wealthy folks and venture capital types mostly think we’re dreamers who don’t have the right stuff (or backing from “others” like them already in place) to get it done. Playing it safe by letting others take the risk is their game, because it’s to their advantage. People with money can afford to sit and watch the world struggle under the weight of too much problem, not enough solution.
We’d rather try and fail than perpetuate the American status quo (currently something out a bad dream) with a know-nothing, do-nothing attitude and a fat bank account. Just because folks have money doesn’t mean they necessarily have a wealth of intelligence.
Folks in the middle really (really) hope the ENVIROLENE® opportunity proves as good as advertised. It is the middle class, after all, that has the most to gain from our clean fuel’s success. Playing life as it happens is all most middle class folks can do at this point. Although, some people do take time to leave an endorsement or drop a dollar or two in our community funded project account.
Folks at the bottom are in too much economic pain to see past the next paycheck, if they still have a job. These folks aren’t playing footsy with reality, they’re struggling to survive.
Folks in the middle and the bottom, we’re doing this for you and yours, and us and ours. If what we’re talking about seems too good to be true, don’t worry. This one’s all true. And your support is vital to our effort to spark the first two ENVIROLENE projects. Thank you.
Every activist engaged in combating human-caused climate change or specific elements of the current energy economy knows that the work is primarily oppositional. It could hardly be otherwise; for citizens who care about ecological integrity, a sustainable economy, and the health of nature and people, there is plenty to oppose—biomass logging [for generating electricity] in Massachusetts, mountaintop-removal coal mining in West Virginia, natural gas drilling in Wyoming, poorly sited solar developments in California, river-killing dams in Chile and Brazil, and new nuclear and coal plants around the globe.
These and many other fights against destructive energy projects are crucial, but they can be draining and tend to focus the conversation in negative terms. Sometimes it’s useful to reframe the discourse about ecological limits and economic restructuring in positive terms, that is, about what we’re for.
We have a giant to slay, and it isn’t simply problems with big oil or coal. Pollution and runaway CO2 is just the symptom of a larger dysfunction. The real villain is consumer apathy born of a century of fossil energy, with emissions and pollution growing worse with the massive increase of coal and petroleum use worldwide…and a lack of credible clean liquid fuel alternatives to date. The “carbon” problems are growing, and they’re over our heads, on our lands, and in our oceans, rivers, and lakes! In 2010, CO2 emissions went up by 5 percent: the fastest rise in the last 20 years.
Our clean higher mixed alcohol fuel can change this terrifying end-game scenario of too many carbons, when enough people understand how (and why) it’s the only fuel that can solve more problems than producing and using it creates.
Here’s a kind and thoughtful man who’s been around the block and learned more than most from the journey. Dick White is a resident of Hamilton, Montana, and a fellow charter member of the Bitterroot Toastmasters Club, to which I belong.
Last Wednesday, I gave a speech to fellow club members titled “Occupy Energy,” which made the case for community involvement and support for developing our clean fuel project in western Montana. Toward the end of the speech in the call to action, I asked people to visit our donation site www.tenmillionpeople.com and drop a dollar or two in the project bucket as a donation to help the project move forward.
Dick doesn’t own a computer, and says he doesn’t care to. He’s enjoys the moment in the real world. He’s also a good listener who understood that I was not giving a practice speech. (Although I did say it wasn’t a practice speech, this is the express purpose of our club.)
Dick is the oldest person in our Toastmasters club. He’s also the wisest, in my opinion. Because he’s no spring chicken, he’s the least likely of all our club members to ever see the benefit from his donation: a fuel that replaces gasoline and diesel and ethanol. Made from a community’s trash and biomass by the community.
At the end of the meeting, he motioned for me to come over and talk. I sat down next to him and he dropped $40 on the table and told me to make good use of it. I was stunned. He reached in his pocket and covered everyone in the room.
I am humbled by his warmth, generosity and kindness. Thanks for paying it forward for the next generation, Dick!
The video points to housing and other traditional markets for wood products. Responsible use of wood from America’s forests can also include using what has historically been piled and burned because there was no better use of the needles, barks, branches and cones from thinning and fuel reduction projects. (All that “waste” biomass can make a lot of great clean fuel, an un-traditional but valuable use of wood.)
Want to see alcohol fuels succeed? Open up the liquid fuels marketplace with flex fuel vehicles and blending infrastructure. Learn about the Open Fuel Standard Act of 2011 legislation currently before Congress and contact your elected representatives to request their support.
DOE ‘Billion Ton Study’ Update Shows Biomass Still Sufficient to Meet Goals
The DOE this week released an update to its 2005 Billion Ton Study that says biomass feedstock under baseline assumptions remain sufficient to meet near- and long-term bioenergy goals, including the production of 85 billion gallons of biofuel annually, enough to displace a third of the nation’s transportation fuel demand. In fact, the update says, under a high-yield scenario, more ambitious goals may be feasible. Unlike the 2005 version, the update takes into consideration environmental sustainability and identifies the likely costs to access the biomass resources.
“National security is not wars out there anymore, it is the war of ideas here in the US.”
“Clean coal” and ethanol just are not that policy, nor will they ever be, they are a charlatans game.
Two sentences in the article linked below stuck out, especially with the bloodbath in the global economy and today’s 300+634 point drop in the DJIA. At what point does America begin to wake from its slumber and realize the house is on fire?
Link to full article: Coal and Ethanol Are Not Alternative Energy Policy, written by Andrew Smolski of oilprice.com
Good article on ethanol. Understand what’s wrong with using a staple food crop, corn, to get you to Wal Mart and back and you will understand what’s wrong with ethanol in your gas tank.
Yes, we need ethanol to clean up gasoline and stretch the petroleum supply as far as possible. But we don’t need the ethanol industry to break the back of the country by insisting it’s the only “oxygenate” fuel. There are others, and one of them spanks ethanol!
At least in the USA, ethanol fermented from corn starch is currently leading the renewables industry in production volume, but its shortcomings aren’t going away. In fact, the inherent shortcomings of corn ethanol are being embraced by emerging “cellulosic” fermentation processes that use crop wastes instead of the food crop itself. For example, cellulosic ethanol has cost billions in investment, yet major questions of its long-term viability remain.
Ethanol, ethanol, ethanol. Ethanol all the time, everywhere you look. It’s easy to think that ethanol is the only renewable fuel, regardless of what it is fermented from. It isn’t. Especially in parts of the country that can’t grow corn!
Here are questions that aren’t even being asked about ethanol, but should be:
Why focus on one single alcohol in the first place? Why choose a fuel that can only be made from certain feedstocks, such as corn or corn wastes? Why choose a fuel that cannot be pipelined because it’s too corrosive? Why choose a fuel that gets up to 20 percent less mileage than gasoline? Why choose a fuel that requires laborious and expensive fermentation?
Why choose a fuel that can only be made in a relatively small number of states? Why choose a fuel that requires billions in subsidies? Why choose a fuel that consumes almost 40 percent of America’s corn crop?
Why indeed.
Peruse today’s biofuel publications or articles on the internet for information about higher mixed alcohols. You won’t find much. Not because higher mixed alcohol isn’t an excellent clean fuel, it is! There’s a whole lot to like about a fuel that can be made nearly anywhere, from nearly anything carbon, and has a whopping 138 octane rating.
Nope. It’s because many of these publications, some of them backed by ethanol or petroleum interests, don’t really understand higher mixed alcohols, much less how they are made: using natural gas, coal, municipal solid wastes and biomass. Or worse, they understand completely and are keeping Americans in the dark.
What is the potential of a clean fuel that can rapidly scale to world proportion, rival fossil and renewable fuels in volume, price, and performance, drop seamlessly all types of gasoline and diesel engines without modification, lower tailpipe emissions, clean up coal, and most importantly, provide investors with consistently high returns? With no crops or subsidies required?
What do rampant beetle kill, rising temperatures, massive floods, and oil spills all have in common? They’re all being fueled by fossil-energy combustion—here in Montana, and around the planet.
Crews work to clear oil from the Yellowstone River in Laurel, Montana. (Jim Urquhart, AP/ July 5, 2011)
This poignant article about recent disasters in Montana, as seen through the eyes of two people who are not just fighting floodwaters and an oil spill on their property, they are also working tirelessly (as are we) to educate and inform Montanans about their clean energy options.
Alexis Bonogofsky and her partner, Mike Scott, are at the forefront of the fight against a carbon-centric vision of Montana’s future. When they aren’t growing their own food or taking care of their goats, both are full-time environmental activists: Alexis is with the National Wildlife Federation, Scott is with the Sierra Club. They don’t just fight coal and oil companies; they work to show their fellow Montanans that there are other ways to create energy and jobs.
We sent Alexis and Mike a message of solidarity and asked how we can work together in this “mother” of all fights here in Montana.
We’re not asking you to put your life on the line for Mother Earth, just a couple of sentences of support for our mission. We need your endorsement. Is this too much to ask for your Mother?
What’s the price of gasoline? In the U.S. it’s about $4 a gallon. But some experts say the true price of gas is much higher. What about the costs of pollution, and the global and local problems caused by it? Who pays for those? This animated feature from the Center for Investigative Reporting calculates the carbon footprint and other “external costs” of gasoline use in the U.S. Reported by Sarah Terry-Cobo. Produced by Carrie Ching and Sarah Terry-Cobo. Sound mix and editing by Carrie Ching.
Bioroot Energy clean fuel facilities will produce ENVIROLENE® 138 octane higher mixed alcohol fuel.
EPA-registered, water-soluble, biodegradable ENVIROLENE® blends seamlessly into gasoline and diesel fuels for more mileage, more power, and lower emissions.
Evidence of fossil energy pollution might be over our heads, but it’s still everybody’s problem in need of a solution.
