industry
NEWS Coskata Inc., along with strategic investor General Motors Corp. and plasma gasification veteran Alter NRG Corp., officially unveiled its semi-commercial cellulosic ethanol facility near Madison, Pa., in mid-October. Though slightly behind the start-up date announced initially, CEO Bill Roe said that “slow and steady wins the race.” He attributed the company’s progress to a “hybrid approach” to cellulosic ethanol—a combination of biochemical and thermochemical technologies—and the significance of being truly feedstock flexible. “A number of other companies are moving down these pathways (thermochemical and biochemical), and bringing these types of technologies to commercialization—it’s all based on good, sound science, but there are inherent strengths and weaknesses in both of those,” Roe said. “What we’ve done is take the best of both—a thermal front end that gives the feedstock flexibility that we allude to, combined with a biological conversion step which gives us very high yields, and singular product as opposed to a range of products.” Coskata’s process technology is capable of converting multiple feedstocks, including woody biomass, agricultural waste, energy crops and construction/industrial wastes, into synthesis gas. The syngas is cleaned, cooled and passed through a conversion process, where it undergoes bacterial fermentation using Coskata’s proprietary microorganisms. “They have a singular purpose, and that is to ingest CO2 and hydrogen and exhale ethanol,” Roe said. “We’ve made them into super athletes in the course of our technology development. They perform not like they do in nature, but like we need them to in an industrial process; we’ve done lots of microbiological work and strain management development.” The $25 million semi-commercial plant, 30 miles southeast of Pittsburgh, is co-located with a pilot-plant gasifier owned and operated by a unit of Calgary, Alberta’s Alter NRG, which has been perfecting its technology for several decades. Among many technology advancements made since the commissioning of the company’s first pilot plant in Warrenville, Ill., Roe said water consumption reduction is significant. “It’s not something that gets a lot of play, but we’re very interested and concerned,” he said. “At our first commercial plant, we will have reduced the total water consumption to 1.3 gallons per gallon of ethanol produced, far below anything right now, and we think that’s going to be a very important parameter in the future.” Now that Project Lighthouse is complete, Roe said a site in the southeastern U.S. has been selected for the company’s first commercial-scale facility, and that Coskata would likely be pulling in licensee companies over the next few months. “We’ve chosen to be a technology provider, rather than an operating company,” he said.
14 BIOMASS MAGAZINE 12|2009
PHOTO: COSKATA INC.
Coskata: Slow and steady wins the race
Coskata’s semi-commercial cellulosic ethanol facility is equipped with a wood chip feed-handling system.
The plant will consume 3,000 wet tons of biomass per day, Roe said, so it will need more than just wood residuals as feedstock. “You can’t sweep the floors and find that—you have to harvest,” he added. “We’ve been working with feedstock suppliers.” Engineering and design for the commercial plant began in