The forming of the company was announced today by GM Holden chairman and managing director Mike Devereux, as he confirmed plans to introduce the breakthrough refining process to Australia to make ethanol to be blended with petrol for motor vehicles.
The GM Holden official said a plant would be built in Victoria with a capacity of turning up to a million tons of household garbage and building waste into more than 200 million liters of ethanol per year.
“The plant here could potentially process hundreds of thousands of tires a year which are currently a huge contributor to Australian landfill,” said Mr Devereux in a speech to the American Chamber of Commerce in Australia.
Household waste produced by all major cities in Australia could potentially be used to generate ethanol for the fuel known as E85, according to Holden’s energy and environment director Richard Marshall, cited by GoAuto.
“You have to start with one plant, obviously,” said Marshall. “The whole view on this particular business model we have got is that you could easily support a couple of plants in each of the major capital cities."
“They are the ones that generate the most rubbish. If you look at the amount of rubbish that’s generated in Melbourne, it is something over three million tonnes a year,” he added.
The new company is one of the first outside North America planning to generate ethanol from waste using the Coskata method, which was invented by American biological renewable energy technology company Coskata Inc.
One of the first activities of the new company would be to trial Australian-style waste in the ethanol-making process at Coskata’s ‘lighthouse’ facility in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
“That is to prove our business model completely on the actual feedstocks we are going to use and the Melbourne specification of waste,” concluded Marshall.
Google News