GreatPoint Energy announced plans Thursday to build a plant to produce natural gas from biomass, coal and petroleum coke in its home state of Massachusetts.
The facility, which is expected to be finished in one year, will be located in Brayton Point at the research and development center of energy utility Dominion.
Massachusetts Gov. Duval Patrick was set to speak at a ceremony to announce the $25 million investment, which is benefiting from a state research grant.
This is a rendering of the planned biomass gasification plant to produce natural gas.
(Credit: GreatPoint Energy)GreatPoint has developed a technique for converting different feedstocks into methane, or natural gas, through a catalyst-based gasification process. It says it can create natural gas that costs less than current market prices.
It has attracted the attention of top-flight venture capitalists and other industrial companies. Last month, it announced an additional $100 million investment led by Dow Chemical, Suncor Energy, AES, and Citi division Sustainable Development Investments.
The plant in Massachusetts will use wood chips, corn stover, and switchgrass as a feedstock to make natural gas as well as coal and petroleum coke.
With its other plant projects, GreatPoint intends to place facilities near coal mines to make natural gas and sequester carbon dioxide generated during the gasification process underground.
The company also intends to build a gasification plant in Alberta, Canada, using petroleum coke, which is a byproduct of oil drilling in the tar sands there.
GreatPoint Energy, a company with technology that converts coal to natural gas, has secured $100 million to finance construction of commercial plants.
The third round of funding, first reported by CNET News.com, was led by new investors Dow Chemical, Suncor Energy, AES, and Citi division Sustainable Development Investments, Daniel Goldman, the executive vice president and chief financial officer of the Cambridge, Mass.-based company, said on Friday.
The natural gas will be transported through existing natural gas pipelines.
The company now has a test facility using coal in Des Plaines, Ill., and intends to use petroleum coke from the tar sands of Alberta, Canada as a feedstock to make methane.
With the financing, the company plans to build a large demonstration plant and begin construction of a large-scale manufacturing facility over the next few years.
"There are some natural synergies between all the (investor) companies either for power generation or for treating waste products from the tar sands in Canada," Goldman said.
The company's initial investors, which participated in the financing round, were venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Khosla Ventures, Advanced Technology Ventures and Draper Fisher Jurvetson. In its first two rounds of funding, it raised $37 million.
GreatPoint Energy intends to construct methane plants near coal-mining areas and to take the carbon dioxide--a greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming--created through its gasification process and sequester it underground. Or, the carbon dioxide can be used to aid oil and natural gas exploration.
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