Frack ’er Up

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