Wood-chip ethanol maker opens plant
Start-up Coskata on Thursday is starting up a facility that can turn wood chips into ethanol, a step toward producing at large scale next year.
The "semi-commercial" plant in Madison, Pa., will use a variety of techniques to convert the cellulosic material in plants or even municipal trash into liquid fuel that's cheaper than gasoline, according to the company. Its method reduces greenhous gas emissions dramatically and uses less than half the water than is needed to process gasoline, according to the company.
A 1,500-gallon bioreactor at Coskata's demonstration ethanol facility.
(Credit: Coskata)It plans to test a number of different feedstocks at the Pennsylvania plant, called Lighthouse, and is now negotiating with feedstock providers for planned large-scale operations next year, Coskata CEO Bill Roe said in a phone interview. It is also designing a 50 million to 100 million gallon per year facility somewhere in the southeast U.S. that would use southern pine wood chips, he said.
The ethanol industry has slowed down significantly over the past two years with a number of producers shutting operations in the face of falling gas and commodity prices. Corn ethanol has also been accused of having questionable environmental benefits. Meanwhile, there still aren't commercial-scale second-generation ethanol operations with use nonfood, cellulosic biomass for fuel.
Roe said Coskata's demonstration facility will give it a technical and engineering blueprint to scale up. Financially, it intends to license its technology and to finance at least it first plant, he said. General Motors, a supporter of flex-fuel vehicles, is an investor and is testing its fuel.
Coskata's hybrid process combines different technologies, including a gasifier and a bioreactor that uses micro-organisms to produce ethanol.
At the Pennsylvania facility, Coskata will use a plasma gasifer from Westinghouse Plasma that converts biomass, such as wood chips, into what's called synthesis gas, a combination of carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, and hydrogen, Roe explained.
Then genetically optimized, proprietary bacteria digest the synthesis gas and convert it into ethanol. There is a third step for upgrading that liquid into fuel-grade ethanol, with a lot of the water being recovered in the process, according to the company. The greenhouse gas reduction compared with gasoline is 96 percent, it says.
The facility in Pennsylvania will be able to produce about 40,000 to 50,000 gallons per year. Once scaled up, the cost will range depending on the feedstock but it will be about $1 per gallon, Roe said.
"Because we have the ability to use a wide array of feedstocks, the cost point for this ethanol will be world class. It's a whole new game. If you're limited to one feedstock like a grain, you're probably setting yourself up for challenges," he said.
Martin LaMonica is a senior writer for CNET's Green Tech blog. He started at CNET News in 2002, covering IT and Web development. Before that, he was executive editor at IT publication InfoWorld. E-mail Martin. 
And what exactly is the source of this bio-mass feedstock? It's stuff that should be turned back into the soil as natural compost/fertilizer. So we're going to end up having to rape our land to feed our cars, and that's not a good solution.
1. Who says you have to pipeline it across the country? The most effective approach might be to situate plants near where suitable material exists and use each regional plant to serve *that region.* No one's saying it has to replace all gas starting on day one.
2.It sounds like they're using biomass from managed forests, which are replanted after harvesting anyway. So the people with the strongest incentive not to pillage the land? The company managing that forest. Who says you have to strip *all* the biomass? Perhaps they will pull from a wider area and only use a percentage of the wood chips, leaving the rest for compost/fertilizer.
There are potential problems with nearly any technology, but it usually helps if you approach it from a construtive point of view looking for solutions rather than simply assuming things will fail.
I didn't realize that we wanted to reduce the number of greenhouses?
Right. IF it does work, who do you think will buy out this corporation? They are not oil and gas companies, they are portable energy companies and they will use what ever technology will make them the most money. And they currently have the cash to buy out just about any company they want.
Also, since they are using pine chips, I expect their source is from managed forests, which typically take 30-50 years to regrow. Except for the life cycle, managed forests are just like any other crops, and the math is really simple: if you plan to harvest every 30 years, harvest 1/30 of the forest every year and replant it. While managed forests are not as good for the environment as old growth forests (like other planted crops, they are monocultures and make less effective habitats), they are certainly much better than if you simply plowed under a non-income-producing forest and replaced it with a subdivision or a factory, and as they are left to grow, they sequester a whole lot of carbon.
Good argument, care to try again?
As to the pipelines, I thought the major lines had the capability of pushing different types of liquids through without mixing them. I thought that technology existed, possibly with some type of buffer liquid in between. This may only work with different types of oil, but I couldn't find the info online.
Perhaps with the name Coskata, they could distribute through the Costco stores:-)
If solar cells and nuclear have proliferated and are developed to the point where hydrolysis of water is feasible, why not just use the electricity? Also, why not use the electricity to synthesize gasoline or ethanol (This process is carbon neutral if it derives all it's energy from nuclear or solar. Carbon would be pulled from the air and made into the desired fuel, then burned and released in equal amounts back) Carbon allows the energy to be stored in an easy to transport medium, why make it hard by just using hydrogen with no added benefit?
Or wait, why don't we just use the already existing natural way of trapping sunlight that is already efficient at trapping solar energy. cheaper to produce, cultivate, and refine. AKA plants.
Also, if you use it in fuel cells, you need vast quantities of Platinum. The platinum is the single most important fact in making a hydrogen car. And we aren't going to get any more. In fact, it will become more expensive if population growth continues.
You could only get more Platinum by mining asteroids. So when we can economically mine asteroids, I'll reconsider
I agree that hydrogen is not, in general, the answer, but there has actually been interesting research into lower-cost platinum-free fuel cells.
One area of study is for third-world rural electrification -- if some of the new low-cost solar panels being researched pan out, the idea is that you use the solar to power a village during the day, but divert enough energy to a fuel cell to store power for night. Because both the low-cost fuel cells and the low-cost solar panels are less efficient, the solar farm requires more space. This means that they are not a good choice for suburbs and such, but one of the things third-world villages actually do have enough of is land.
Also, we don't have to eliminate every last drop of gasoline for a technology to be useful, and no single technology needs to be the magic bullet.
Suppose we only used 20% of that agricultural waste, leaving 80% for its current uses. That would still be enough to make a significant dent in the problem, right? Combine that with more fuel-efficient cars and plug-in hybrids that can draw some of their power from the electrical grid (using environmental best practices for electricity generation) rather than stored fuels, and there could collectively be a significant decrease in fossil fuel consumption, and hopefully a corresponding decline in greenhouse gas emissions.
- by sanenazok October 15, 2009 1:43 PM PDT
- Forget wood chips - bunny rabbits is the way to power our future!
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