cost as little as $2 per gallon, or about half the price

NAUTILUS EDUCATION cost as little as $2 per gallon, or about half the price gas currently goes for at local pumps, to produce at a full-sized facility, even though such an industrial plant would require a lot of capital to build. However, the machine Fang shows me is not run- ning on the biomass that Fang originally tested: wood chips, switchgrass, canary grass, miscanthus. Instead, it churns through natural gas, turning methane into syngas. Making long hydrocarbons from the single car- bon in methane molecules is “very easy,” he assures me. But “natural gas is not true green,” he concedes. “There is no benefit in [the reduction of] greenhouse gases. Biomass 1s still true green.” Natural gas from the fracking boom has revolution- ized the global energy landscape—particularly in the United States, the world’s biggest producer of shale gas. But it is also controversial. Gas burns cleaner, but it still produces around half the greenhouse emissions of its dirtier cousins like coal, not including the excess methane that leaks from fracking sites and the pipe- lines that transport the gas. Fracked gas can also con- taminate groundwater supplies. And while in 2012 it brought America’s carbon footprint down to its low- est level in 20 years, relying on it in the long-term will make it hard to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions, as is required to combat climate change. As the price of natural gas slid in response to the glut of shale gas, Primus changed gears in mid-2012 to move away from biomass and to focus on making syngas from natural gas. This is not a new idea: Exx- onMobil built a plant in New Zealand in 1986 to turn natural gas into methanol and then gasoline, but aban- doned its efforts when the price of petroleum dropped dramatically in the mid 1990s. Now, though, natural gas 1s cheap and attractive. Boyayian has a map of all the shale formations in North America tacked to the wall of his office. “The world is full of shale,” he notes. An earlier version of Primus’ machine, tuned to pro- cess biomass, sits swathed in silvery insulating tape in a locked and darkened lab. “Right now it is aban- doned,” Fang says. The company insists that the state- ment doesn’t apply to Primus’s biomass efforts more generally. “This is the way to get to biofuels,” says Pri- mus CEO Robert Johnsen, of the gas to gasoline pro- cess, through a tight smile. “Will we be the ones to get there? Maybe.” | BETA PRODUCT The energy in these fuels is the pent-up power of ancient sunlight, which billions of photosynthetic microorganisms soaked up before dying. 26 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_015486