This is very interesting. But is it really the best way to do it? After all, the technology has been around for a long time and people aren’t rushing to take it up. I think there are some worthwhile things to say about it:
- This aims to produce liquid fuel, because liquid and gaseous fuels have become standard in our world, and for good reason, they are so easy to store, pump, and inject into internal combustion engines.
- External combustion engines, such as steam or Stirling can use solid fuels, which internal combustion engines find very difficult to do.
- There are a whole range of materials which it will always be difficult to convert into alcohol – how could you do it with coconut shells?, and the equipment will always be big, fixed (not movable omto site), need lots of skilled management and have low rates of throughput.
- I think it would be much easier to convert carbonaceous waste into charcoal, which can be ground small enough to have most of the practical advantages of liquids, and which could be produced from almost anything. All processing of fuel costs energy, but if this is the only way of using the material, it would otherwise be waste.