Ethanol from steel mill flue gasses (seriously)

[Daox]

Unfortunately its a short article, but interesting none the less.

Worldwide industrial solutions company Harsco and bioenergy technologies firm LanzaTech have teamed up to promote the capture and reuse of steel mill flue gases as a source for domestic fuel.

Founded in 2005 in New Zealand, LanzaTech was the first company to successfully demonstrate production of fuel-grade ethanol from steel mill flue gases. Its proprietary gas fermentation technology converts the carbon monoxide-containing waste gases into "low-cost" ethanol, significantly reducing greenhouse gas emissions while providing an alternative to traditional corn-based ethanol.

The tie-up with Harsco is intended to accelerate the introduction of this technology across the steelmaking industry. LanzaTech says it's already working with customers throughout the Americas, Europe and in select emerging markets. Here's the kicker: LanzaTech estimates that, on the worldwide level, steel mill waste gases could convert to 30 billion gallons of ethanol a year.

LanzaTech, Harsco team up to convert steel mill flue gases to ethanol

[Old Tele man]

...reminds me of the process of recovering WATER from PISS, actually doable, but in reality seldom done!

[deathtrain]

Originally Posted by Old Tele man

...reminds me of the process of recovering WATER from PISS, actually doable, but in reality seldom done!

i have done it!!!!

[Frank Lee]

Nice- don't want those emissions into the air anyway. And the quantities make it worthwhile?

[Daox]

Unfortunately it doesn't really say anything about cost or how much additional machinery is needed to do it. It may be real simple or it could be horribly complex. I didn't really dig too much farther to see.

[jamesqf]

Originally Posted by Old Tele man

...reminds me of the process of recovering WATER from PISS, actually doable, but in reality seldom done!

On the contrary, done all the time by Mother Nature. It's a good bet that a good fraction of glass of water you drink passed through a dinosaur at some time :-)

PS: For the mathematically inclined, there are about 3.26e20 gallons of water on Earth. Figure about a billion dinosaurs alive at any moment, each drinking 1 gallon of water a day. That's 3.65e11 gallons per year. Dinosaurs existed for about 100 million years, so cumulatively drank and excreted 3.65e19 gallons of water, so by simple math 11% of all water was once dinosaur piss.

Now we've got about 65 million years of mammals to think about...

[Allch Chcar]

into "low-cost" ethanol

That's the key point here. If it was expensive it wouldn't be worth the effort.

30 billion gallons of Ethanol worldwide isn't significant. But it's from waste and it's something.