GM Partners With Coskata To Turn Garbage Into Gas

By Lloyd Frazier

If you can’t get better mileage from your current model lineup, then make the fuel they use less expensive.  GM has partnered with Coskata to make the fuel their cars and trucks use more affordable for the American consumer.  Coskata has developed a three-step process for turning waste materials such as wood, old tires, and even solid waste from garbage dumps into to usable ethanol fuel for under a buck a gallon.  That is half the cost of producing a gallon of gasoline.  This means half the price at the pump.  Today that would translate to around $1.50 per gallon.  Just think about this for a moment.  Remember all the hoopla about the U.S. being overrun with garbage not to many years ago.  Now it seems, this garbage turns out to be very useful.  The guilt of disposing of your everyday household waste is gone.  Now it can end up in someone’s gas tank to get them to work or go on a family outing.  Plus, Coskata’s process uses less than a gallon of water to produce one gallon of fuel.  Most of the current processes for making ethanol takes three or more gallons to make one gallon of ethanol.  Kind of brings back memories of Christopher Lloyd’s character, Doc Brown, putting garbage in the fuel tank of his Delorean time machine in ‘Back To The Future.’

There are more than 3 million E85 capable GM vehicles on the road today, with more to come.  GM is already promising all their new Hummer vehicles will be E85 capable in future model years.  This strategy could bring back customers that have started to abandon large trucks and SUV’s.  GM can also use the technology to make their manufacturing plants more environmentally friendly by being able to re-use waste and non-recyclable parts for fuel generation.  Coskata will have a processing plant churning out 50 to 100 million gallons of ethanol by 2011.

So, does this mean that the tree-hugging, Gore worshipping, pine cone eating crowd will back off from a major U.S. manufacturer?  Or, will they still decry that our evil American corporations still need to do more for the environment?  The major problem with their arguments are that they fail to realize that it took awhile to get where we are now.  We aren’t going to remedy our “evil ways” overnight.  Granted it took some government intervention with tougher CAFE standards and a new Bush bio-energy bill to to get the barge moving.  When it is all said and done, the average consumer still holds the trump card in all of this.  The almighty consumer wallet speaks volumes when it comes to how manufacturers decide what to produce and market.  If GM can pull off this strategy with Coskata, they are right back in the game with their profitable large vehicle lineup.  Between cheap ethanol, better battery technology, and perfected hydrogen technology, personal transportation will not have to take a back seat to stinky buses, crowded trains, and the Gore patrol.

And that’s that!