Biofuels Breakthrough?

I just came across a start-up that proposes to convert some of the chemical energy in landfill waste (MSW – municipal solid waste) into glucose, and then sell it to ethanol producers.  I had promised myself that I wasn’t going to get involved with a discussion with these people, but eventually I broke down and wrote:

To summarize: this is a process that calls for the physical sorting of MSW and then converting the cellulosic biomass to glucose via a secret soon-to-be-patented process.

Here’s the problem:   There are currently people who have various processes (pyrolysis/gasification) that convert MSW and other waste streams directly into fuels or electricity. I’m connected with a couple of them personally, and I believe they’ll succeed one day, but they’re not there yet.  In fact, as far as I’m aware, there isn’t one success story in this space anywhere around the globe.  Here’s the kicker: any of these processes are already far more cost effective than going through any possible process, regardless of what it is or how it works, to make an intermediate product like glucose (which sells for 30 cents/pound).

The fact that you have a patent on this doesn’t mean that it has any value.

There are 25 tons of gold in a cubic mile of seawater.  That sounds attractive, until you realize that it means that a ton of sea water contains 1/5000th gram of gold, which is worth $0.0092 (just under a penny) in today’s world.  Nobody’s saying that there isn’t gold in seawater, but anyone with a calculator can see that there is no way to make money extracting it.