GM will soon be making cars that can eat themselves. The man who will enable them to do so is Bill Roe, the new CEO of Coskata, an American company which so impressed GM’s CEO Rick Wagoner that he bought a part of it.
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The ingestion of one car by another (or by itself) is enabled by a bio-refinery process that Coskata has been set up to perfect. The liquid output of the process – when there is one – will be ethanol. The key to GM’s interest in this particular business is that the ethanol production is faster, slicker and cheaper than ever before. A gallon will cost less than $1, according to Roe, which contrasts starkly with today’s $3 pump price of petrol in the US.
The neat thing about this ethanol production process is that it is pretty broad-minded in its appetite. It will tolerate and consume all sorts of filth from the refuse tips, land-fill and building salvage yards.
But the ingredients of its diet that are so essential to this story are door seals, radiator hoses, wiper blades, plastic trim, windscreen washer bottles and the like.
Roe said: “GM likes the variety of inputs that the Coskata process can use. I mean, considering Coskata can make ethanol from some of the residual materials in vehicle recycling – like plastics and rubber, partnering up is sensible.”
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By GlobalDataIt is pleasing that old bits of a car can be recycled to create the very fuel that drives it. And it’s an even nicer fantasy that you could maybe one day ask your repair workshop to give you back your used wiper blades and radiator hoses, and then nip down to the local Coskata refinery and swap your personal rubber goods for a pint of ethanol.
Ethanol is the new cause celebre of Rick Wagoner who was in far better humour than when he had to face the press at the Detroit motor show a year ago. He looked relaxed, cracked jokes and had a whole succession of convincing lines about GM’s competitive advantages.
One of them is undoubtedly (we interviewed his three top engineering directors to substantiate it) the range of engine and transmission technologies being created.
Converting petrol engines to burn ethanol is no big deal. It’s a 100 buck trick. Building engines that will happily burn any combination of petrol and ethanol is no big deal either. All engines coming from the big makers will, before long, have the capacity to burn whatever mix is put in the tank.
A gallon of ethanol is far cheaper than petrol, but it doesn’t take the car as far and it does emit carbon dioxide just the same. Moreover you need land to grow the crops or the trees that will be converted to the juice. Some folk want that land for growing food.
The proponents – Wagoner walking up front with them – see it differently. Plants absorb CO2 while they grow and therefore make a contribution to GHG (greenhouse gas) reduction that way. But more important, they replace carbon fuels that then stay in the ground and people don’t fight and fall out over the small amounts (30 years supply perhaps) that are left.
Wagoner knows that it will be a few years before we have sensible distribution network for hydrogen – which is the long term answer for car propulsion; and that it will take a decade at least to get lithium batteries for electric cars with a reasonable range down to an affordable price.
The only short-term affordable break from oil dependency is ethanol. And now that Roe and Co. claim there is a way of making it cheaply, GM is going to have a crack at pushing it forward. Three years till we get the first commercial-scale refinery and we’re off.
Rob Golding
