Now this here is promising
http://money.cnn.com/2006/06/21/news/economy/cellulose_ethanol/index.htm?cnn=yes
Particularly the clean burning, $1 a gallon to produce part.
Tactical Grace
22-06-2006, 22:26
Wood chip alcohol? Not really new. Ask any Russian. :p
And last time someone in the UK tried fluidised bed biomass gassification, the whole thing clogged with gunk and died. Bye-bye power station, back to the drawing board.
What they are discussing is basically a variation of that. It's one of those projects for a small-time venture capitalist to try his luck, in the hope it's one of the 1 in 10 projects that provides a return on investment. At least with traditional energy, you know you'll have buyers.
Deep Kimchi
22-06-2006, 22:34
It's one of those projects for a small-time venture capitalist to try his luck, in the hope it's one of the 1 in 10 projects that provides a return on investment. At least with traditional energy, you know you'll have buyers.
More like "one of those projects for a small-time venture capitalist to lose everything he has, having been attracted to a crap investment like a moth to a flame"
At least with any form of energy production that actually works, it's a mainstream investment in a proven company that knows bollocks when it sees it.
Tactical Grace
22-06-2006, 22:41
More like "one of those projects for a small-time venture capitalist to lose everything he has, having been attracted to a crap investment like a moth to a flame"
At least with any form of energy production that actually works, it's a mainstream investment in a proven company that knows bollocks when it sees it.
Yeah, I went to a talk once, by a freelance venture capitalist whose speciality was investing in just such projects, or asset-stripping such R&D business units from failed companies.
A dozen investments, and most lost large sums of money. He made a net profit only by virtue of a company that made ball-bearings for the offshore oil and gas industry.
That's right. Selling ball-bearings to oil men made up for a dozen failures along the lines of the above.
Might as well give it a shot; it's possible that it might turn in to something big and make them a fortune. Even if it fails, there's more than a few places to hedge your bets in the alternative energy sector and a ton of money going around to do it with. I think it's kind of like the dot-com bubble; a bunch of companies were formed to sell a new technology, raised money, and burned out...but the ones that survived revolutionized the economy and made the Internet in to a massive, world-spanning network worth trillions of dollars and employing hundreds of thousands of people.
We're in the innovation stage of alternative energy; there are going to be a lot of ideas and a lot of seed money, and eventually the ones that succeed will emerge as major technologies and the ones that fail will burn out and be forgotten. This is just like any new sector in the economy; there's enthusiasm at first, then irrational exuberance, then a burnout, and then organic and massive growth in the viable technologies.
Regardless of whether it succeeds or fails, more money, attention, and research is always a good thing.