{"id":42584,"date":"2019-01-11T08:44:44","date_gmt":"2019-01-11T13:44:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=42584"},"modified":"2019-01-11T08:44:44","modified_gmt":"2019-01-11T13:44:44","slug":"60-minutes-promotes-what-is-probably-a-cellulosic-biomass-scam-on-2019-1-6","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=42584","title":{"rendered":"60 minutes promotes what is probably a cellulosic biomass scam on 2019-1-6"},"content":{"rendered":"

60 minutes promotes what is probably a cellulosic biomass scam on 2019-1-6<\/a><\/h3>\n
Preface.<\/strong> Hey 60 minutes, do some fact checking first.<\/div>\n
\n

On January 6, 2019, 60 Minutes had a segment on an amazing biofuels breakthrough invention by Marshall Medoff, an \u201c81-year old eccentric with no science degree\u201d (watch the video or read the transcript here<\/a>).<\/p>\n

His stunning innovation has won over many famous board members, such as Steven Chu, the former Secretary of Energy, as well as Shell Oil executive Sir John Jennings, George Shultz, former secretary of state and former defense secretary, William Perry.<\/p>\n

Medoff\u2019s company, Xyleco, has also garnered hundreds of millions of dollars from investors impressed with his inventive use of accelerators. Sixty minutes describes this as his \u201cnovel idea of using these large blue machines called electron accelerators to break apart nature\u2019s chokehold on the valuable sugars inside plant life \u2013 or biomass\u201d.<\/p>\n

But wait!\u00a0 There are thousands of research papers going back as far as Imamura (1972) about using electron accelerators to break down lignocellulosic biomass. This is done to create more surface area for the next step, in Xyleco\u2019s case, enzymes to break down the cellulose further.\u00a0 Other ways biomass can be shattered are milling, chipping, shredding, grinding, and pyrolysis.<\/p>\n

But all of these are highly energy intensive methods<\/strong>.\u00a0 In fact, one paper thought that electronic beams were probably economically infeasible (Saini 2015).<\/p>\n

This plant is also likely to fail because all other commercial level cellulosic ethanol plants have gone out of business. Only one plant still exists, POET\u2019s $275 million Emmetsburg, Iowa facility, with a capacity of 25 million gallons per year.\u00a0 I can\u2019t find out how much was actually produced there, but even if all 25 million gallons were made, that is a far cry from the 8.5 billion gallon cellulosic ethanol mandate of 2007, which will be reduced to 418 million gallons in 2019 because cellulosic ethanol is clearly not commercial yet (Rapier 2018).<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

60 minutes promotes what is probably a cellulosic biomass scam on 2019-1-6 Preface. Hey 60 minutes, do some fact checking first. On January 6, 2019, 60 Minutes had a segment on an amazing biofuels breakthrough invention by Marshall Medoff, an \u201c81-year old eccentric with no science degree\u201d (watch the video or read the transcript here). […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[9347,11836,23867,1674,23868,5420,23866,23865,10928,23864],"class_list":["post-42584","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy-2","tag-60-minutes","tag-alice-friedemann","tag-cellulosic-biomass","tag-george-shultz","tag-marshall-medoff","tag-scam","tag-sir-john-jennings","tag-steven-chu","tag-william-perry","tag-www-energyskeptic-com"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42584","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=42584"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42584\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42585,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42584\/revisions\/42585"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=42584"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=42584"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=42584"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}