This would be a great breakthrough, if it scales up to commercial amounts of biofuel:

A biofuel startup in Illinois can make ethanol from just about anything organic for less than $1 per gallon, and it wouldn’t interfere with food supplies, company officials said.

Coskata, which is backed by General Motors and other investors, uses bacteria to convert almost any organic material, from corn husks (but not the corn itself) to municipal trash, into ethanol.

I’m very skeptical. The next paragraph of the article explains why:

“It’s not five years away, it’s not 10 years away. It’s affordable, and it’s now,” said Wes Bolsen, the company’s vice president of business development.

No.  It is not “now.” Check out the picture–it is a guy with a  40 gallon tank. That is not production at a commercial scale. A couple paragraphs later the article says that Coskata will build a pilot plant and produce 40,000 gallons a year.  By way of comparison, we use 400 million gallons of gasoline every day in the United States.

I really hope this process scales up to produce commercial quantities of ethanol. But for now I’m going to wait and see.