CleanTech BioFuels, Inc. (CLTH.OB) is a small company with a big idea. The idea is to turn solid municipal waste, of which the U.S. generates over 600,000 tons each day, into ethanol, and CleanTech now has the licensed technology to do it.
Ethanol, you may recall, has been at the heart of a rising controversy. Ethanol is a versatile renewable fuel, based upon plant material, providing a clean way to tap the sun’s energy. Its biggest advantage is that it can be used to power cars. Since 1975, Brazil has been producing and distributing ethanol, made from sugarcane, and has now effectively replaced 50% of its gasoline use with ethanol. Although there are a number of issues that would make such a transition less likely for the United States, ethanol remains a popular candidate as a major alternative fuel for the future.
However, ethanol today is produced largely from fruits and grains, an important part of the world’s food supply. Demands for ethanol as an alternative energy source are met with objections that industrialized countries could strain dwindling food resources to power their cars.
One alternative is ethanol made from cellulose, something that people don’t eat. But there has always been a question about whether cellulosic ethanol can be produced efficiently enough to be competitive, and whether farmers would have the economic motivation to grow switchgrass and other cellulosic ethanol sources. Now, CleanTech BioFuels, using advanced chemical processing technologies developed at the University of California at Berkeley, has met a major milestone in producing ethanol from municipal solid waste, discarded material that has already been produced.
CleanTech has, for the first time, satisfactorily tested the technology and associated equipment for efficiently generating fermentable sugars from municipal solid waste. The patented technology uses nitric acid, versus the more common sulfuric or hydrochloric acid, for hydrolyzing cellulosic material. CleanTech believes that nitric acid hydrolysis represents the cutting edge of current technology in the cellulosic ethanol industry. These fermentable sugars can then be processed into ethanol.
The advantages of turning waste directly into ethanol are significant:
• It offers a non-fossil fuel source that has an already existing supplier, avoiding agricultural and food supply issues.
• It reduces the cost of transporting waste long distances for disposal.
• It reduces pollution released into the environment by the disposal of municipal solid waste.
• It reduces the amount of material going into landfills by as much as eighty five percent.
• It increases the amount of recyclable materials that can be recovered from municipal solid waste.
• It generates biofuels and other usable energy products at competitive prices.
About QualityStocks:
QualityStocks’ Small Cap Stock Newsletter is a free service that collects data from hundreds of Small-Cap online Investment Newsletters into one free Daily Newsletter Report.
Sign up for “The QualityStocks Daily Newsletter” please visit www.QualityStocks.net
The Quality Stocks Daily Stock Report http://video.qualitystocks.net
The Quality Stocks Daily Blog http://blog.qualitystocks.net
The Quality Stocks “Ones to Watch” http://Gotstocks.QualityStocks.net
Please see disclaimer on QualityStocks website: http://disclaimer.qualitystocks.net
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment