Ineos hopes to be fuelling cars with household waste in two year’s time.

Ineos, the world’s third largest chemicals company, has developed technology that can create commercial quantities of bioethanol fuel from landfill waste – potentially reducing a car’s greenhouse emissions by 90% and solving the problem of waste disposal.

The bioethanol is made up of, amongst other things, municipal solid waste and organic commercial waste – one tonne of such waste can be converted into 400 litres of ethanol.

Peter Williams, Ineos Bio CEO, commented on the technology: “In North America and Europe we will see around 10% or more of petrol (gasoline) being replaced with bioethanol. Our technology will make a major contribution to reducing greenhouse gases and the world’s need for fossil fuels. The fact that we have been able to decouple second generation biofuel from food is a major breakthrough, and we expect our technology to provide cost competitive, sustainable, renewable fuels.”

Just recently, environmental organisations expressed their concern over the UK Government’s decision to introduce the Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation (RTFO), which requires 5% of road fuels to come from biofuels by 2010. A number of organisations, including Oxfam, were concerned that certain biofuels were attributable to growing food prices and rainforest destruction.

However, contrary to other bio fuels, the second-generation bioethanol created by Ineos does not use food crops in the production process, and can be used alone or mixed with traditional fuels to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Other organisations, such as Shell and Codexis, are also formulating biofuels that do not rely on food crops.

The Ineos process has already been tested on a pilot scale, and it is anticipated that industrial-sized quantities of bioethanol will be produced by around 2010.

Ineos has sales totalling US$45 billion (around £23bn), and employs 16,000 people in 14 countries. Ineos Bio was recently created to commercialise and license the new biofuel.