NAUTIL.US | TEXT SETS Will natural gas be a bridge for Primus to green cleaner fuel for standard, dirty combustion engines fuel, or will it be too cheap and attractive to resist as = may remforce drivers’ loyalty to today’s technology. a permanent substitute for biomass? For the moment, | Such lock-in makes a true revolution difficult until the company seems keen to squeeze what it can out of some alternative energy source—whether battery- the shale gale. With the help of more than $50 million driven electric cars or engines modified to burn car- in Israeli money, Primus is building a demonstration —_bon-neutral, as-yet-unmade biofuels—offers the kind plant the size of a house near its headquarters in New _ of convenience and low cost that justifies replacement. Jersey, due to open this year. The location is off the At present, Primus appears set to become part of a map—even Google won’t guide you there, asifit were sprawling infrastructure that reinforces the incentives some secretive skunk works facility, which is how the to use greenhouse gas-producing, gasoline-like fuels. company likes to think of rt. The plant will take natural And for all those concentrated octanes in my tank, I gas from the local utility, run it through tts proprietary — still have to pull into a Shell station to fill up on con- set of chemical reactions and, on the far end, out of a ventional gasoline, blended with corn ethanol, in order spigot, will come gasoline—12.7 gallons per hour at full to drivehome. © capacity. The company’s first commercial plant, due to start construction next year, will likely be located near a source of natural gas. david biello is the Environment and Energy Editor for Scaling up the technology this way will reduce the Scientific American. Ne is currently working on a book about the overhead costs per unit of gasoline—that is, the cost Anthropocene. of fabricating the reactors and buying the zeolites and feedstocks. Plus, Primus’ technology may prove eco- nomi