Green Tech

Start-up ZeaChem has begun construction of a plant to convert wood chips into ethanol and specialty chemicals, a small step forward for the long-awaited cellulosic ethanol industry.

The Lakewood, Colo.-based company said that the plant will be in Oregon and produce about 250,000 gallons of ethanol a year. That's far less than it originally projected but still at a size that will allow the company to scale up to a commercial-size facility in 2011, said ZeaChem CEO James Imbler on Friday.

A few years ago, lots of venture capital money flowed to companies with processes to make ethanol from wood chips, grasses, or trash. But investor and popular interest has cooled, in part because progress has been halting, with only a few demonstration-scale facilities operating in the U.S.

(Credit: ZeaChem)

ZeaChem's process is different from many other companies in that it uses a bacteria called acetogen, which is found in termite stomachs, to break down biomass without the use of enzymes.

The company contracted with Hazen Research to construct the facility, which will be built using different modules that can be transported in truck-size containers, said Imbler. The goal is to have the operation online next year making both ethanol and specialty chemicals, including ethyl acetate.

The plant is financed with $34 million in venture capital that ZeaChem raised at the beginning of the year.

To finance its commercial-scale plant, which is planned to make between 25 million and 50 million gallons of ethanol per year, ZeaChem plans on partnering with oil refiners and pharmaceutical companies. Imbler expects that financiers will be wary of funding first-of-a-kind cellulosic ethanol plants but will invest once processes have been demonstrated at scale.

Updated on November 18 at 5:00 p.m. PT with corrected figure for projected annual production.

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.

A diagram of Iogen's enzyme-based ethanol-making process.

(Credit: Iogen)

A Shell service station in Ottawa on Wednesday will pump gasoline mixed with ethanol made from wheat straw, what the company is calling the first commercial delivery of cellulosic ethanol.

The ethanol was made by Iogen which has a process that uses enzymes to break down straw so it can be converted into ethanol. Shell is an investor in the Ottawa-based Iogen, which has been working on a demonstration facility since 2004.

Shell Canada is hosting a press event at the service station where Canadian government officials are scheduled to be on hand. Cellulosic ethanol is less polluting than corn ethanol and offers up to 90 percent fewer lifecycle carbon emissions than gasoline, according to Shell.

The fuel at the service station will be 10 percent cellulosic ethanol, made from agricultural residue.

Shell has partnered with a few companies in an effort to create a biofuels business. Its demonstration on Wednesday, however, doesn't mean that Iogen is able to produce cellulosic ethanol at commercial scale yet.

"While it will be some time before general customers can buy this product at local service stations, we are working with governments to make large-scale production economic," said Shell executive vice president of future fuels and CO2 Graeme Sweeney in a statement.

There are dozens of companies developing processes for converting wood chips, agriculture residues, or grasses into ethanol, some of which have built demonstration facilities.

The Department of Energy has funded some of these projects but the biofuels industry overall has been stalled by the credit markets' meltdown which has made financing pilot projects more difficult.

Rather than stay in the ground, trash from the Three Rivers Landfill in Ponotoc, Miss., will be turned into ethanol.

Montreal-based Enerkem on Thursday announced plans to produce 20 million gallons a year of ethanol from waste at the Mississippi landfill in a project valued at $250 million.

This is some of the equipment used in Enerkem's multistage process for convering waste to fuel.

(Credit: Enerkem)

The "feedstock" for the ethanol will be municipal solid waste, as well as wood residues from forest and agricultural activities, according to Enerkem.

The company's process can sort household trash, diverting material that can be recycled and processing the rest into ethanol, a liquid fuel blended with gasoline.

The project is one of only a few in North America to convert waste products into ethanol or electricity using processes that waste-to-energy companies say is cleaner than existing technologies such as incineration.

After sorting and drying the waste, Enerkem breaks down the material with heat and pressure using a gasifier. The gasifier creates a synthesis gas that is a mix of carbon monoxide and hydrogen. That synthesis gas, or syngas, is then converted into ethanol or other chemicals.

The company, which was founded in 2000, has built a few demonstration facilities in Canada using both municipal solid trash and utility poles as a feedstock. At a conference earlier this month, company CEO Vincent Chornet said the technology is largely developed and that Enerkem is now looking to commercialize the process more broadly.

Coskata and BlueFire Ethanol are two other cellulosic-ethanol companies that plan to turn both wood chips and municipal solid waste into ethanol.

Royal Dutch Shell and Codexis have expanded their partnership to see if biofuels made from non-food sources can be commercially viable.

The deal, announced by the two companies announced this week, is an expansion of a pilot project Codexis was working on with Shell to improve biocatalysts in conjunction with Iogen Energy.

Biocatalysts are used in cellulosic ethanol production to break down the agricultural by-products into sugars so that they can then be fermented and distilled into biofuel.

Codexis, which signed a 5-year deal with the energy giant in 2007, is known for developing a "super enzyme" for its biocatalysts.

"In just over two years, our biofuels collaboration with Shell has grown from a pilot project to a significant multifaceted program to create commercial-scale biofuels from non-food sources," Alan Shaw, Codexis president and CEO, said in a statement.

As part of the deal, Shell increased its equity stake in Codexis, resulting in another board seat. Shell already had one board seat from the deal made in 2007.

Shell is certainly just one super-player with its eye on cellulosic ethanol.

Many companies are looking into "renewable petroleum" and research institutions have been looking at enzymes to speed up the cellulosic ethanol production process. General Motors is an investor inMascoma, and was one of the sponsors of a recent study that found cellulosic ethanol could compete with gas.

One start-up company, Sapphire Energy, is even looking at using algae as a non-food source.

Start-up company Mascoma said on Wednesday that a demonstration facility is making ethanol from wood chips and other non-food sources, bringing cellulosic ethanol a step closer to commercialization.

Click on the image to launch a photo gallery of Mascoma's research lab in Lebanon, N.H.

(Credit: Martin LaMonica/CNET Networks)

The test facility in Rome, N.Y., uses different feedstocks, including wood and grasses. Production is at a rate of 200,000 gallons per year. Mascoma didn't disclose the yield, or how much biomass is converted into fuel.

The company is testing two methods for making ethanol: a traditional enzyme-based process and one using a genetically modified microbe designed to make the conversion cheaper.

Mascoma is one of a handful of upstart companies developing different technologies to convert wood chips and other non-food biomass into ethanol, which is an additive to gasoline.

Because of the economy and disrupted financial markets, non-government funding for cellulosic ethanol pilot facilities has become harder.

At the upstate New York facility, Mascoma said that it is benefiting from state grants aimed at promoting renewable energy businesses.

This biogas electrical plant runs on straw from corn.

(Credit: Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft )

German scientists at the Fraunhofer Institute for Ceramic Technologies and Systems have developed an electricity plant that produces its biogas, a form of biofuel, from non-edible plant waste.

The Dresden, Germany, plant produces biogas from corn waste like husks and stalks, notably not cobs. Like other bioenergy plants, the biogas is then converted into electricity at the plant.

Because this electricity plant does not use any edible crop sources, the system, if scaled up for wider use, would not interfere with world food supplies, according to a statement from the group.

Not only is the plant agro-friendly because it avoids using feedstocks, the scientists have also come up with a quicker method for fermenting the ingredients.

The biomass used at the Dresden plant are decomposed in about 30 days compared to the typical 80 days it takes to ferment feedstock biomass.

"Corn stalks contain cellulose which cannot be directly fermented. But in our plant, the cellulose is broken down by enzymes before the silage ferments," Michael Stelter, head of the research group, said in a statement.

To produce the electricity from the biogas, the plant uses a high-temperature fuel cell with a combined electrical and thermal efficiency of about 85 percent. That, too, is more efficient, according to the scientists who contend that the average combustion engine only has an efficiency of about 38 percent.

As of now, the plant is only built to produce about 1.5 kilowatts of electricity, barely enough to supply one home. Now that the system works, the group plans to step it up to two kilowatts.

The joint study sees cellulosic ethanol as a viable alternative for reducing oil dependence while protecting food crops.

(Credit: Sandia / Randy Wong)

The U.S. can replace one-third of its annual gasoline use with ethanol by 2030, concludes a joint study released Wednesday by Sandia National Laboratories and General Motors.

Of the 90 billion gallons of ethanol that need to be produced in 2030 to meet that goal, the study says, 75 billion gallons could come from cellulosic ethanol.

Using cellulosic ethanol--or ethanol produced from forestry or agricultural waste--is considered a way to prevent the displacement of crops that feed humans.

Corn-based ethanol has been blamed by some for higher food prices and shortages because food producers are at times forced to compete with energy companies for the grain. Some also argue that the growing demand for such crops is also responsible for indirect land-use change, the destruction of rain forests and wetlands to make room for more farmland.

Proponents of cellulosic ethanol argue that because the fuel is produced from agricultural byproducts, it has no impact on the food supply or land use.

Cellulosic ethanol could be competitive in price without the need for incentives when oil is at $90 per barrel, according to the study. That cost analysis includes factors such as land and water use, transportation of feedstocks, construction of plants, and the energy used to produce cellulosic ethanol.

The inference here is that the biofuel may not be competitive if gasoline prices fall while the cost of making the biofuel does not.

Something else to consider: General Motors is an investor in the cellulosic-ethanol company Mascoma.

The Sandia-General Motors report follows a University of Minnesota study published last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

That study found that cellulosic ethanol could help reduce air pollution in more ways than previously thought. The research group found that cellulosic ethanol not only emits less greenhouse gas than gasoline than was previously known, but also emits fewer fine particles into the air. The researchers also came up with a formula quantifying the long-term health and environmental costs from the fuel production and use of three types of fuel.

"For each billion ethanol-equivalent gallons of fuel produced and combusted in the US, the combined climate-change and health costs are $469 million for gasoline, $472-952 million for corn ethanol depending on biorefinery heat source (natural gas, corn stover, or coal) and technology, but only $123-208 million for cellulosic ethanol depending on feedstock (prairie biomass, Miscanthus, corn stover, or switchgrass)," the University of Minnesota report said.

Two companies trying to lay claim to having the first commercial-scale cellulosic ethanol plant in the U.S. have secured financing to get closer to that goal.

Range Fuels on Monday said that it expects to receive an $80 million loan guarantee from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to build an ethanol plant in Soperton, Ga.

The plant, which will use wood chips from neighborhood pine forests as feedstock, is on track to begin producing next year.

Range Fuels uses a thermo-chemical process called gasification where chips are converted into a synthetic gas and then made into ethanol.

Another firm, Verenium, said last week that it plans to break ground on a facility in Florida later this year which will produce ethanol fuel from grasses.

The plant, which is expected to be operating in 2011, will make 36 million gallons of ethanol a year from grasses grown nearby. Verenium has a process that uses specially designed enzymes to convert biomass into ethanol. The project received a $7 million grant as part of Florida's "Farm to Fuels" initiative.

There are several companies trying to find commercially viable methods for making ethanol from non-food feedstocks but there are still only a handful of cellulosic ethanol demonstration plants in the U.S.

The economic situation, which has made borrowing more difficult and lowered commodity prices, has made it harder for these firms to test their technologies at commercial scale. Some corn ethanol plants have been idled, while some new construction has been delayed.