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.
Cellulosic-ethanol company Coskata on Friday announced that it has broken ground on a plant in Pennsylvania that will be operating by early next year.
Coskata has a technology that combines a gasification chamber and a bioreactor to make ethanol from a variety of feedstocks, such as wood chips or even tires. General Motors, Khosla Ventures, and Advanced Technology Partners are investors.
The $25 million plant in Madison, Pa., will make 40,000 gallons per year. At that size, it's meant to demonstrate the process at commercial scale. Its plans also call for a full-scale facility, producing 50 million gallons to 100 million gallons a year of ethanol, by 2011.
The company has said it can produce ethanol at $1 per gallon and that its process is clean, able to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 84 percent, compared to gasoline. Corn ethanol, meanwhile, makes about the same greenhouse gases as gasoline production.
The plant-building plans were announced by Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell. Many states are eager to provide incentives to start-ups like Coskata, such as tax breaks, to create clean-tech "clusters."
Nearly every cellulosic ethanol company claims it will be able to produce fuel at $1 or less a gallon in a few years. William Roe, CEO of Coskata, in a meeting on Monday explained how his Warrenville, Ill., company will do it.
It's one of the more interesting processes out there, because it combines both biological (i.e., microbes) and thermochemical (heat and chemicals) processing. Menlo Park, Calif.-based ZeaChem is also taking a mixed approach, but it combines thermochemical and biological processes in a different manner. Most other companies are using primarily chemical or biological processes. We don't know who will win, but the mixed approach on paper does seem to have advantages.
Here are the highlights from the meeting with Roe:
• First, the company can use a wide variety of feedstocks for making fuel: wood chips, weeds and non-food crops like miscanthus, human waste, and carbon-heavy garbage (such as tires). Biomass, ideally easy-to-grow crops that don't require much water, will likely be the primary feedstock. The ability to exploit various feedstocks reduces exposure to crop failures or shortages. Coskata, which has received an investment from General Motors, also makes fuel from the lignin in biomass. Some companies making ethanol from strictly biological processes can't use lignin to make fuel.
"You can imagine biorefineries in every single state. This is an enormously efficient process," Roe said. "We don't need 'eurekas' anymore. We think it comes down to execution."
Conceivably, Coskata could even produce fuel from the carbon monoxide from steel mills. If you could capture all of the carbon monoxide that comes out of mills worldwide, you could make 50 billion gallons of fuel a year, or close to a third of the U.S. annual consumption of fuel.
• Handling all of these different feedstocks is actually a little simpler than it looks from the outside. The first stage in Coskata's process revolves around converting the feedstocks into synthetic gases. The different feedstocks can be segregated and processed differently. Waste can be converted to gas with plasma technology, for instance, while plant matter can be gasified with less energy-intensive methods. This allows the company to optimize on different gasification processes. It also reduces variability in processing.
"There's actually a lot of innovation going on in gasification," Roe said.
• Coskata has happy microbes. Once the syngas is produced, it is fed to microbes that convert it to liquid fuels. The microbes live in large colonies that collect on membranes. Fuel is produced when the gas passes through the membrane. Part of the company's intellectual property revolves around coming up with a way to let the microbes live as colonies and form slimes. Yum. Some other companies swirl their microbes in water and keep them in perpetual motion. Letting them live in colonies allows more of the gas to be converted to fuel.
The company is experimenting with five microbes and is particularly fond of two.
• Less distillation. Microbes can create a fluid that contains a small percentage of alcohol or so by volume but can't get it to 99 percent purity on their own. That's why distilled spirits are stronger than beer.
Rather than fully distill the fluid, Coskata will distill to about 50 percent and then employ a membrane from Membrane Technology Research in Menlo Park to purify it the rest of the way. This cuts processing costs and energy. Coskata actually doesn't need the membrane to get to $1 a gallon. "This is gravy," Roe said.
• Coskata doesn't want to make fuel. Unlike several other companies (such as Range Fuels and Imperium Renewables) Coskata doesn't want to build and operate megaplants. It will set up demonstration plants and some moderate-sized production plants, but it primarily wants to earn revenue and profits as time goes on from licensing the technology to big companies. The company has talked to large forestry concerns, petroleum producers, and chemical manufacturers. The interesting part about this approach is that it leaves the onerous challenge of building billion-dollar plus facilities to those who have been doing it for decades. Start-ups just aren't geared for that.
Soon, Coskata may make an announcement with another partner. Roe wouldn't give us names, but Chevron has cut a number of development deals in this area recently, including one with Solazyme, which has come up with a way to ferment algae for biodiesel.
Coskata will have a formal coming-out party for its 40,000 gallons a year demonstration facility. Construction is already under way. Roe wouldn't tell us what state it is in, but will announce it April 24 with the governor of the mystery state.
Coskata's process and fuel is relatively clean, he added. Overall, it cuts greenhouse gas emissions by 90 percent, well-to-wheel (or stump-to-pump, if you prefer) compared with gas. It also uses less water than most ethanol processes, which rely on food crops.
To clarify, the $1 a gallon figure is how much the fuel will cost to produce. It includes the cost of the feedstock, the cost of the energy required to convert raw materials into fuel, and labor. It does not include paying off the capital of the facilities, taxes, retail mark-ups, or other expenses that can be added as the fuel wends its way through distribution. On the other hand, the $1 a gallon figure does not include subsidies, which lower the cost to consumers. (Ultimately, adding in all these factors can raise the price to around $1.50 a gallon, Zeachem CEO James Imbler estimated in a recent interview.)
Still, at $1 a gallon, that's half the equivalent costs for gasoline, which is around $1.95 to $2.00 a gallon.
Coskata, a start-up that wants to make ethanol out of tires and other stuff found in the dump, has raised $19.5 million in a second round of funding, according to SEC documents scoured by Private Equity Week.
Earlier this year, General Motors announced it had invested in the company and that Coskata would build a demo ethanol plant by the end of the year that would be capable of producing 40,000 gallons of fuel a year. GM will buy the fuel.
Coskata's ultimate goal is to make fuel for $1 a gallon. (After taxes, subsidies and transportation costs, the price goes up, but most people are aiming at around $1.15 to $1.50 per gallon at the pump.) It hopes to have a 100-million gallon a year plant by 2011.
A whole host of start-ups are in the midst of raising money or building cellulosic ethanol plants. Each company has its own processes and feedstocks, and the key to success (or failure) for most of them will be how cheaply and efficiently they can produce fuel at high volumes. Mascoma, for instance, converts grasses and wood chips into fuel through biological fermentation. Range Fuels, meanwhile, converts wood into fuel through thermochemical processes similar to those for converting coal into a liquid. Then there is ZeaChem, which converts wood into acetic acid and mixes the acetic acid with hydrogen to make fuel.
Coskata--which uses both thermochemical and biological processes--says it can beat competitors in the price of feedstock. (See .) Trash is incredibly cheap, which the company claims gives them a cost advantage over some other cellulosic companies who will be buying trees and farmed grasses. Coskata will also use crops, but a significant portion of its feedstock will come from materials with little market value. (Competitors, however, claim that cooking heterogeneous materials into a fuel is complex and hence adds processing costs.)
Coskata, which was developed at universities in Oklahoma, says it can get more than 100 gallons of fuel out of a ton of byproducts. ZeaChem claims they can get 160 gallons. Other companies are somewhat vague when it comes to numbers, taking a common strategic position.
A lot of these companies also share investors, so don't rule out mergers. Coskata, Mascoma, and Range Fuels all received funds from Khosla Ventures, as did Gevo, Amyris Biotechnologies, LS9, and a few others. It's a cozy world. In a few years, the world will know who is right.
You're nothing but trash!
(Credit: Coskata )Year-and-a-half-old ethanol company Coskata made its public debut at the North American international Auto Show in Detroit in January, where it announced a partnership with General Motors.
On Wednesday, Coskata said it has signed a deal with ICM to manufacture a cellulosic ethanol plant that will be up and running by 2010.
ICM is an ethanol plant design and engineering firm responsible for about half of North American ethanol production, according to the companies.
When he announced the GM deal, Coskata President and CEO Bill Roe said that the company will be signed on to many partnerships to commercialize its ethanol clients, which make the biofuels from a variety of sources, including agricultural wastes and wood chips.
He said that full-scale plants will be able to produce 100 million gallons of ethanol a year and would cost $300 million to $400 million.
As part of Coskata's GM deal, GM will invest in the company and test the fuel from a 40,000-gallons-a-year facility near a GM test track.
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Many in the auto industry are touting ethanol as the solution to the challenge of post-petroleum transportation. Major carmakers advertise many new cars can run on E85--a mixture of 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline--and they trumpet the fuels environmental benefits relative to gasoline. But the ethanol story is not as straightforward as it sounds. Aside from the lack of infrastructure--only around 1,400 out of 170,000 U.S. filling stations have ethanol available--the production of ethanol from corn has drawn criticism for its cost (in terms of food-stocks and land usage) and the relative inefficiency of the conversion process.
An alternative alternative is cellulosic ethanol, which is made from nonfood sources, including a variety of organic, industrial, and domestic waste. At this year's Detroit auto show, General Motors announced that it had invested in Coskata, a producer of cellulosic ethanol based in Illinois. Check out our gallery to learn how Coskata's conversion microorganism-based conversion process works and why cellulosic ethanol promises to be a big deal in the automotive world.
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