Republican Response To Fisker

To be fair and balanced, Hank The Electron In The Tank Paulson has laid off his production workers in Benicia California who were there to put the finishing touches on the Chinese made Electric Vehicle the Coda.

I said many a time that Coda was Coda Blue and heading toward a flat line.  Benicia was once the capital city of California for 13 months in 1853 and 1854 and now Benicia has seen Coda come and go in also approximately 13 months.  The first Coda was rolled out in March 2012 and the factory was shut in February 2013. 

Wow something big happens in Benicia for about year in every 160 years.  The poor Benicians will have to wait till 2173 for their next bit of excitement.  Here is a link to the news report from the Benicia Herald that heralded the arrival and lamented the departure of Coda.

http://beniciaherald.me/2013/02/26/coda-leaves-benicia/

It is ironic that the largest employer in Benicia remains the Valero oil refinery with 516 workers and the employment in EV production is now zero.  Neither Al Jazeera Gore nor Hank The Electron Tank Paulson will ever come to Benicia.  They have found other greener places to exploit.

Benicia is a “Tree City” so perhaps they can make bio fuel from the trees and invite Kior or Zeachem to locate in the now empty Coda plant.  Or better still they can increase the size of the Valero refinery and get some of those good paying manufacturing jobs Obama promised.  When Chu gets back to Stanford he may want to visit Benicia and take in the old state capitol and the Coda plant.

Fisker Fiasco - Fires 160 Workers

 Update - ABC News is all over the story and linking it to Solyndra.  Al Gore has gone into hiding.  Joe Biden is missing.  Obama is asking Steven Chu for answers.  Chu should be indicted for treason and Governor Markell of the First Sate was seen buying Depends.  Here is the ABC News Link

http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/signs-solyndra-fisker-lays-off-75-percent-employees/story?id=18889485

Here is a link to how the Governor of Delaware reacted to the news that Al Jazeera Gore could not pull of the whiskers of the Fiskers

http://www.vcstar.com/news/2013/apr/05/del-governor-notified-of-fisker-layoffs/

The question is who told Governor Markell the news?   Was it Mr. Gore, Mr. Biden, Dr. Chu, Mr. Obama or the tooth fairy?

Fisker fires 80% of their workers today according to Bloomberg

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-04-05/fisker-said-to-fire-80-of-staff-as-deal-evades-plug-in-carmaker.html?cmpid=yhoo


A sad day for 160 people!!!   My take on Ray Lane resigning yesterday from HP as the Hewlett Packard Chairman is that he will take the heat for Al Jazeera Gore and Joe Biden in the Fisker Fiasco.

Ray Lane is Al Jazeera Gore's partner at Kleiner Perkins and is the KP guy on Fisker's Board of Directors.  Fisker will be a very public debacle and many investigations will be held.  Ray Lane will be one busy guy taking all the punches for Al Gore, Joe Biden and KP in this fiasco.

Ray messed up HP and probably should have been fired at the last shareholders' meeting but he needs to put 110% effort as a football coach would say to keep the Fisker mess contained.  Hopefully Ray has a big brush to clean this toilet.


I do hope Senator Grassley goes big time after them all who brought the Pox of Fisker upon us.

KIOR at 4 Oh 4 On 4 4

KIOR the dog of a company Condi hyped and Vinod took public closed today 4-4-13 at $4.04.   Well done Condi you spoke and people fled the stock since March 18.  In China the number 4 is a synonym for the word death.  Well 4 Oh 4 is triple death.  Two fours and an absolute zero.  Once again the laws of thermodynamics prevail over former secretaries of state like Condi and Colin who sit on the boards of gangrene companies.

These two former secretaries of state have red on their hands for the nonsense they communicated about weapons of mass destruction.  They now have green in their hands from the money they received from greedy VCs who wanted their "advice".    Where I come from advice means knowledge and these two thermodynamic neophytes know bupkis about entropy and enthalpy.  Here is the wiki link to what bupkis means.

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bupkis


Bupkis means absolutely nothing.  And in thermodynamics entropy reaches a constant minimum as temperature approaches absolutely zero.  When KIOR follows A 123  (now B 456) into the eleventh chapter they can change their name to Bupkis.

A new fourth law of thermodynamics is written as follows:  "When a former secretary of state provides thermodynamic advice to a venture capitalist, the advice is worth Bupkis particularly when there were zero weapons of mass combustion to be found even though the former secretary of state claimed the absolute existence of such weapons and went as far to engage in war that resulted in a  mess in oh potamia"

The Complex At Work

KIOR the company Condi Rice hyped a few weeks back as having made cellulosic transportation fuels a “reality” is now trading at $4.24.  That is down a third since Condi made her bold and incorrect statement in the company’s press release on March 18.

Her exact words in the press release were:  "KiOR is changing the American energy equation by innovating and commercializing an entirely new generation of hydrocarbon-based diesel and gasoline fuel. By making the promise of cellulosic fuels a reality, KiOR demonstrates that these fuels are an attractive option for lessening America's dependence on foreign sources of energy." 

KIOR will soon be asking Vinod Khosla and the State of Mississippi  to cough up more dough to continue their folly of making diesel from pine trees.  Another company I blogged about, Zeachem, that made vinegar from poplar wood and then ethanol from the vinegar could not get a bridge loan and had to furlough workers in Oregon at its pretend “demonstration” plant the US Government funded with tax payer money.  Read the link below on this failure.

http://www.bizjournals.com/denver/blog/earth_to_power/2013/04/zeachem-scales-back-at-oregon-biofuel.html

 My favorite auto company, Al Gore’s Fisker, is on its last legs and has reportedly hired a bankruptcy attorney.   Read how Al Gore’s company was a darling of the DOE and is now close to reading Chapter 11 of the book on Obamanomics in the link below.

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/04/02/Obama-Loan-Recipient-Fisker-Preps-for-Bankruptcy

 Tesla will allow its customer to pay as you go with a new loan program to get the car with little down.  They abandoned any plans for the $50,000 people’s EV that Chu was promised when he forked over a half billion dollars to the upscale car company.  So now the rich and famous can drive a government funded car with little down as the government funded banks are willing make loans on the cars that Elon will guarantee the residual value of after three years of pretend ownership.

Read the link below on the pay as you go program.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2013/04/02/elon-musk-tesla-lease/2047863/

The gangrene crowd are losing tree limbs everywhere yet we continue to have hope and lean forward.  No doubt the DOE has not gone back to Tesla and demanded the half billion back on the basis that it was given to the company to produce a “people’s EV”.  No the DOE will say the 85 kwh $100,000 model S now available on a hybrid lease/loan was always the cornerstone of the Obama policy to green up America.  So what if Elon is hogging the lithium for the 0.01%.  As for Fisker Al Gore has not put his money where his big mouth is so at least Elon is a little greener than Al Jazeera Gore.   I still am dreaming of the government turning vinegar into wine from poplar trees  in Oregon and Condi discovering the vast quantities of lost weapons of mass combustion that were once pine trees in Mississippi.

Folks I am not making this up.  This is all real and is the workings of the Complex.

Ten Green Googles

Vinod Khosla, the billionaire Silicon Valley venture capitalist, told Bloomberg TV in October of 2010 that "there'll be ten Googles in the next ten years in energy." 

When I was a young child my father would sing a lullaby to me that was “ten green bottles hanging on the wall and if one green bottle should accidently fall there’ll be nine green bottles hanging on the wall”.  It then continued that if there were nine green bottles and one should fall there would be eight green bottles.  This continued till there were no bottles hanging on the wall.  Here is a youtube link that sings the lullaby to you.
  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ak7kedzR8bg

Vinod is the VC who brought us the green companies of Kior (Condi is on the board), Range Fuels, Cello, Calera, and several other green bottles that could not hang on the wall of the laws of thermodynamics.

I suggest that readers watch the two videos.  The lullaby first and then Vinod’s fairytale interview with Bloomberg back in 2010.  Here is the link to that interview 

http://www.bloomberg.com/video/63936292-khosla-interview-about-renewable-energy-industry.html

Talking of utter thermodynamic failures our old friends at A123 asked the SEC to accept a name change for the company.  It will now be called B 456.  Here is the SEC link to this effect.

http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1167178/000110465913025275/a13-9083_18k.htm

 B456 used to supply batteries to Al Gore's wonder car company Fisker.  Fisker is on its last legs.  It furloughed all of its workers and has engaged a bankruptcy lawyer just in case Al Jazeera cannot save the struggling company that took almost $200 million in loans from Chu Chu in the name of we the American people.  Here is a link on the latest from Fisker that is hanging onto the wall by a whisker.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-03-28/fisker-furloughs-staff-for-a-week-to-conserve-carmaker-s-cash.html


I don't think fiction could be as crazy as this.  Khosla claims the oil companies think "linearly".  At least the oil companies know that thermodynamics rules.  Khosla should have stuck to something simple like knitting.  Thermo was way over his head.  Al Gore should have stuck to counting hanging chads rather than hanging green bottles.

More on Acetic Acid and Ethanol

Several readers emailed me to ask if I was sure the yield of ethanol from acetic acid on a mass basis was only 75%.  I am actually sure it is less than 75%.  One mole of acetic acid will yield one mole of ethanol.  The molecular weight of acetic acid is 60 the molecular weight of ethanol is 46.  If the reactions are fully efficient and no reagent is lost the maximum mass yield of ethanol from acetic acid is 46 divide 60 or 76.6%.  With two reactions to get from acetic acid to ethanol each step will have a yield loss.  In the best of cases a 90% yield is pretty much the highest one can expect in an industrial reactor.  With two reactions one multiplies 76.6% by 90% twice and the optimistic industrial yield of ethanol from acetic acid is 62%.

Secretary Vilsack and his team at the USDA should perform a thorough and detailed analysis on the claims Zeachem has made.  If indeed the process should stop at the first step of making acetic acid then the USDA should significantly reduce the loan guarantee and simply tell Zeachem to demonstrate the biological production of acetic acid from cellulose and hemicellulose.  I am pretty sure the termite bugs will make a dilute solution of acetic acid and then Zeachem can sell vinegar to Whole Foods for $25 a bottle and the USDA may see five cents back on the dollar for the loan guarantees even if these loan guarantees are reduced to $50 million from almost a quarter billion.

I suggest we all write to our representatives in the US House as well as our Senators to apply $200 million of these savings to the fiscal cliff.  Spending money to make wine out of vinegar makes no sense when there is no money to keep the Whitehouse open to the public.  Even Marie Antoinette would not say if they have no wine let them drink vinegar.   Let’s see what Obama, Vilsack, Boxer, Feinstein, and Huffman do when I contact them.

USDA – Turns Vinegar Into Wine and Dollars Into Manure

I was asked to comment on Zeachem a company that turns wood into ethanol.  I have often blogged that the idea of cellulosic ethanol is a waste but I was particularly interested in Zeachem’s approach.  They convert the cellulose and hemicellulose in wood into vinegar (Acetic Acid) using a naturally occurring bug that is present in termites.  They also convert the lignin in the wood into hydrogen.  In a traditional chemical plant they react the acetic acid to form ethyl ester and then use the hydrogen from the lignin to produce ethanol from the ethyl ester.  Lots of chemistry steps to yield the biofuel

The US DOE is done with wasting billions so now it is the USDA’s (Dept of Agriculture) turn to blow our money.  Ag Secretary Vilsack was happy to provide almost a quarter of a billion dollars of loan guarantees to Zeachem for a facility in the port of Morrow in Boardman Oregon that will use locally grown poplar trees for the source of wood

OK so the USDA wants to turn vinegar into wine in a place called tomorrow.   For argument sake let’s dream that the bugs derived from termites can effectively turn cellulose into acetic acid (no bloody way they will).  Why not just stop at selling biovinegar.  Acetic Acid has a value of approximately $500 a ton.  Acetic acid is heavier and denser than ethanol and there are yield losses through the multiple processing steps to get the ethanol.  Also the gasification of the lignin to hydrogen is expensive and wasteful of energy. 

Let’s assume 0.75 pounds of ethanol result from one pound of acetic acid, therefore the cost of only the acetic acid is $666 per ton of ethanol.  Adding labor, maintenance, capital recovery, catalysts, and other costs will probably double this cost to around $1,400 a ton of ethanol.   Also the lignin could simply be burned as a fuel and this should be charged as a cost to the production of the ethanol rounding out the ethanol cost at approximately $1,500 a ton.  At $2.50 a gallon a ton of ethanol sells for approximately $750 a ton.  Wow make it for $1,500 sell it for $750!!  This is called Obamanomics.

So why in heavens name would a sane person convert the acetic acid they claim they make into ethanol they claim they make when the bio acetic acid is a more “profitable” and less risky business.   Of course the answer is that President Obama and Secretary Vilsack cannot dole out a quarter of a billion dollars for biovinegar when it is much more “palatable” to dole out the money for biofuel.    You see Oregon is known for its award winning wines not for its balsamic.

The folly of making vinegar into wine only can play out with free money from the government.  In rainy dreary Oregon the foresters are happy as the sun will come out in Morrow to grow the poplar trees.  Who said government money does not grow on trees.