Will natural gas be a bridge for Primus to green

NAUTIL.US | TEXT SETS Will natural gas be a bridge for Primus to green fuel, or will it be too cheap and attractive to resist as a permanent substitute for biomass? For the moment, the company seems keen to squeeze what it can out of the shale gale. With the help of more than $50 million in Israeli money, Primus is building a demonstration plant the size of a house near its headquarters in New Jersey, due to open this year. The location is off the map—even Google won’t guide you there, as if it were some secretive skunk works facility, which is how the company likes to think of rt. The plant will take natural gas from the local utility, run it through its proprietary set of chemical reactions and, on the far end, out of a spigot, will come gasoline—12.7 gallons per hour at full capacity. The company’s first commercial plant, due to start construction next year, will likely be located near a source of natural gas. Scaling up the technology this way will reduce the overhead costs per unit of gasoline—that is, the cost of fabricating the reactors and buying the zeolites and feedstocks. Plus, Primus’ technology may prove eco- nomical enough at a scale small to allow its plants to be distributed close to remote natural gas wells or even sources of biomass. It is no coincidence that the com- pany based itself in verdant New Jersey, “the Garden State”; proximity to biomass is crucial for producers, because transporting heavy and unwieldy wood or corn stalks across large distances tends makes the end product too costly and undercuts the greenhouse-gas savings that are a large part of its appeal. As I prepare to drive off, Fang carts out one of his collection of red plastic gas cans and dumps a liter or so of Primus-made, natural gas-to-gasoline fuel into my tank. A test car tooled around on it last summer, with no problems. The hope is to be able to charge a premium for the higher-octane premium product. “People pay twice as much for organic food,” Boyayian says. “So why not pay more for green gasoline?” My fuel sensor can tell the difference: it registers an anom- alously high miles-per-gallon number. Fang gives me two thumbs up as I pull away, watch- ing me drive off on his preferred solution to the ener- gy crisis. It’s unclear whether Primus will ever find the occasion to turn back towards biogasoline—and whether that’s a long-term fix for the world’s ener- gy and environmental conundrum. Striving to make 27 cleaner fuel for standard, dirty combustion engines may reinforce drivers’ loyalty to today’s technology. Such lock-in makes a true revolution difficult until some alternative energy source—whether battery- driven electric cars or engines modified to burn car- bon-neutral, as-yet-unmade biofuels—offers the kind of convenience and low cost that justifies replacement. At present, Primus appears set to become part of a sprawling infrastructure that reinforces the incentives to use greenhouse gas-producing, gasoline-like fuels. And for all those concentrated octanes in my tank, I still have to pull into a Shell station to fill up on con- ventional gasoline, blended with corm ethanol, in order to drivehome. © david biello is the Environment and Energy Editor for Scientific American. He is currently working on a book about the Anthropocene. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_015487