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MATTER | BIOFUEL

Frack ’er Up
Natural gas is shaking up the search for green gasoline

BY DAVID BIELLO

I AM SPEEDING DOWN New Jersey’s highways, propelled by gasoline with a dash of ethanol, an alcoholic biofuel brewed from stewed corn kernels. As I drive through the outskirts of the township of Hillsborough, in the center of the state, I see that spring has brought with it a bounty of similar “biomass,” 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 Primus 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 natural 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 combine environmentally-friendlier technologies with older and dirtier ones in order to compete. In fact, Primus may become a leader in advancing this kind of technology. “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

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