Now that the campaigns are past Iowa, maybe the politicos will address the fact that corn based ethanol is not cost effective.

This looks very promising. I would support the immediate importation of Brazilian sugar ethanol as a stop gap until this process could be brought online in a large scale manner.

Also of note, there is an article in the current BusinessWeek about a partnership between private investors, Renault, and Israel to mass produce a new take on plug-in electric cars. Worth a read.

Time to dump my stock in Chevron and John Deere.

No, they'll still be big players. But they'll be selling liquefied composted banana peels!

This is pretty cool if it works out. Anything that STOPS putting our food in our tanks is good. High corn prices are really affecting people right now around the world.

That's right out of the Professors car in the Back to the Future series, when he dumps the garbage into the tank. Seriously in the City of about 50,000 and metro area I grew up in, it was the practice during the war years to collect what was referred to as "swill" as well as solid waste type garbage(mainly tin cans and jars before the days of recycling), and we burned everything that would burn out back in a burn barrel (another no-no in urban areas today). We had two cans one for cans and other solid waste and the other for rotting kinds of waste from food. They used to take this to the local dump, and separate it out and cook it, and feed it to a herd of pigs. They used to periodically burn stuff (old furniture etc,) at the dump as well. Eating meat that had been produced from garbage doesn't really appeal to me, but it seems that organics could be collected and processed for fuel like this then composted if we got our act together. Certainly better then sending kids to Iraq and methane generating organics to be buried and slowly release methane into the atmosphere.

Evidently boiling garbage is still used to feed pigs.

Have enjoy your next luau and roast pig on your Hawaiian Vacation

http://www.albertapork.com/news.aspx?NavigationID=2158

garbage is still used to feed pigs

Were you somehow thinking the food you eat is made out of something new?

Alan,

We kept both chickens and pigs, and fed both our food scraps everyday. Having a backyard "pig" as many family farms did is one thing, raising them for production and getting the garbage from a lot of random sources could be an issue which is probably why the UK outlawed it. I remember I tried feeding our two pigs once from the leftovers and plate scrapings from a church supper, and they had the trots for the next two days. Not a pretty picture.

Stories like this speak underscore the delusion of the anti-car agenda. Sam Adams et al have beleived for some time that Peak Oil and Global Warming will result in declining automobile use.
Leaving the masses dependent upon rail transit to go pick up the family groceries and avoid starvation.

Technology is in the middle of a surge that will produce advances guaranteeing a rise in auto and truck use well into the lives of our grand children.
Adams and friends are indeed delusional.
Are you going to vote for him anyway?

Something in me says that I'd be a lot more optomistic if this outfit wasn't a startup, looking for capital and looking to sell new stock.

The suggestion in the breathless story in WIRED that this outfit is "backed" by GM is not borne out by a detailed reading of the actual web site of he outfit. See the "History" tab on the site.

Just call me cylindrical, (Hey, I resemble that remark!) but I remember the big run ups in OTC and Vancouver Exhange traded stock prices for shale oil extraction companies in the late '70s and '80s.

Lots of folks bought in to shale oil stocks, hoping to make a fortune, but when the pump and dump was done there were lots of investors holding worthless paper and lots of securities fraud lawsuits.

It would be great if the process works out. I'll wait for more actual results, rather than inaccurate news stories, befor I cheer my self hoarse. Or invest.

I don't think the oil shale failures were any sort of scam, though. Exxon, Union Oil and others invested HUGE amounts of cash into those projects (after the gov't introduced a few... "incentives") and discovered that they couldn't extract the oil cheap enough. I know this 'cause I was a pimply-faced teenager when my dad worked for one of the supporting construction companies there. Talk about a wild time - the little town of Grand Valley (pop. approx 250?) was renamed "Parachute" and within 2 years there were somewhere around 8,000 residents, I believe, with projections for many, many thousands more. Quite a boom town. You should have seen the near-riots on the day the workers drove up the cliffs to find the gates closed and the project shut down (I believe Union Oil remained, and obviously the oil companies are going back in this day of $90/barrel oil). We packed up our house, stopped by the school to say "adios" and were outta there in 2 days. Thankfully we hadn't yet closed on the house we were buying.

same prostitute, different pimp.