Natural gas is shaking up the search for green gasoline

MATTER B IOFUEL Frack ’er Up Natural gas is shaking up the search for green gasoline BY DAVID BIELLO AM SPEEDING DOWN New Jersey’s highways, | propelled by gasoline with a dash of ethanol, an alcoholic biofuel brewed from stewed corn ker- ~~ nels. As I drive through the outskirts of the town- ship of Hillsborough, in the center of the state, I see that spring has brought with rt a bounty of similar “bio- mass,” as the fuel industry likes to call plants. Trees line the road and fresh-cut grass covers the sidewalks as I pull into the business park that is home to Pri- mus Green Energy—a company that has been touting a technology to transform such biomass into a green and renewable form of gasoline. But there’s a hitch. The boom in hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” a technique in which horizontal drilling and high-pressure jets of water are deployed to release gas trapped in sedimentary shale rock, has made natu- ral gas cheap and plentiful. That’s not bad for Primus, whose technology can make gasoline from natural gas, biomass, or even low-grade coal, such as lignite or peat. This versatility makes Primus a potential part of what has been called the “olive economy’—companies that are neither bright green nor darkest black, but com- bine environmentally-friendlier technologies with old- er and dirtier ones in order to compete. In fact, Primus may become a leader in advancing this kind of technol- ogy. “We can be as dark as you want or as green as you want,” says geologist, serial entrepreneur, and Primus salesman George Boyajian. In July, President Barack Obama gave a major speech on climate change that described natural gas as a “transition fuel” towards the “even cleaner energy economy of the future.” But Primus’s trajectory raises the question of whether natural gas is a boost on the road to a genuinely green fuel, or if it is prolonging our addiction to dirty modes of transport, and taking us on a detour from a low-carbon path. At the Primus headquarters, I first meet Primus’s chief chemist Howard Fang in front of a prototype of a Primus conversion machine. Fang, who joined the company for what he calls his “semi-retirement,” is ILLUSTRATION BY PETER & MARIA HOEY 23 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_015483