Usually, when the word biofuels comes up, people think of a harvest of something (corn, sugarcane, etc) that can be grown in a field. However, cellulose exists in many things, from banana peels to cardboard to telephone poles. Canadian biofuel company Enerkem is focusing on telephone poles as an energy source. As a matter of fact, telephone poles are what companies are beginning to term “negative cost feedstocks”, which means anything that you get paid to take away.

Enerkem has a thermo-chemical process that transforms wood into ethanol. Despite the fact that old telephone polls are less ideal than fresh wood, due to their various chemical treatment, they are suitable for producing energy. The Enerkem plant will be converting old telephone poles into about 1.3 million gallons of ethanol per year, within a couple of months. Of course, these negative cost resources are only going to exist for so long, and will not have an impact on a significant scale. However, to help cellulosic ethanol companies get going and begin to scale up their solutions, they’re ideal.