The
Progressive Automotive X-Prize is the latest high-profile contest from the folks who kick-started space tourism with the original
X Prize. The goal of the Auto X Prize is "To inspire a new generation of viable, super-efficient vehicles that help break our addiction to oil and stem the effects of climate change." Most entries to the contest are hybrids, electric cars, super-efficient combustion engines, and the like. But Jim Mason of
All Power Labs, a homebrew gasification-and-biochar startup, is trying to make a bold statement by entering the contest with a vehicle that runs entirely on the contest's own waste. Cheeky as that is, it's not even the best part -- the best part is, their system should automatically win the emissions part of the competition, beating million-dollar R&D programs of major automakers with a DIY hack on an old pickup truck. (Their entry won't be the vehicle shown above.) How could it win? Because gasification with biochar is, in theory, a
carbon-negative process. Gasifiers can turn any organic matter (peanut shells, wood chips, unused copies of the X-Prize's own 68-page-long
competition guidelines) into fuel through a process of pyrolysis that gives off
"syngas," a combination of hydrogen and carbon monoxide gases. Those gases can then be burned very cleanly in an engine, producing water and CO2 exhaust. Of course, depending what the original organic matter is, and how well-tuned to it the gasifier is, there can be other impurities as well; but there is a large benefit that most combustion processes don't have: the leftovers of the pyrolysis process are
biochar, which is good fertilizer for gardens or fields, and which also happens to sequester more carbon than burning the syngas gives off. Hence the carbon-negative process. Mason says:
The result is the very odd and somewhat dangerous notion that "the more we drive the car, the more we scrub greenhouse gases from the atmosphere" ...
I have no idea if and how the Auto X Prize will deal with this entry. It causes lots of issues/problems for how they have structured their rules. They can't just agree to calc the GHG equivalents like the biochar enthusiasts would do, or we win that category by default. But they also can't just ignore it. Hopefully it will at least provoke an interesting conversation.
The truck may have a hard time achieving the X-Prize's desired 100mpg equivalent -- would they allow the leftover biochar to be subtracted from the mass of input fuel, because it's a useful product? The actual fuel burned by the truck's engine will be the syngas given off by pyrolysis, which is a tiny fraction of the total mass of fuel put into the gasifier. The majority of the fuel turns into char. Hopefully the Auto X-Prize will accept their entry and let them race. Allowing them into the competition certainly furthers many of the competition's goals: Offering a "level playing field" that newcomers can participate in, educating the public on the possibility of carbon-negative fuel processes (which sounds like science fiction, and most people would never believe), and benefiting the world. If today All Power labs can make a pickup truck named 88MPH that runs on shredded contest pamphlets, maybe tomorrow we can have Deloreans running on banana peels and other household scraps. Who knows?
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