Coskata Unveils Next Gen Flex-Ethanol Facility In Pennsylvania
Today, Coskata Inc. unveiled their semi-commercial flex ethanol factory in Madison, PA. This factory will serve as the first commercially viable flex ethanol factory, which produces ethanol from a variety of feedstocks other than just grain—which is an important step to satisfy food vs. fuel issues and start moving past ethanol from corn.
According to Coskata, their process uses less than half the water needed to make a gallon of gas, while producing seven times the energy of the fossil fuel used in the process.
- » See also: BP Could Start Selling Biofuels By 2010
- » Get Gas 2.0 by RSS or sign up by email.
The semi-commercial facility can make ethanol from many different organic feedstocks other than just grain, including wood biomass, agricultural waste, construction waste, and recycling waste. This flexibility allows Coskata to site these types of facilities just about anywhere a viable fuel feedstock can be produced or delivered.
The new plant uses the Westinghouse Plasma Gasification process on the front end, and Coskata’s syngas-to-biofuel conversion process on the other end—combining each company’s technology to provide a viable, flexible fuel source. The Madison, PA, facility is minimum-engineered and can be scaled up to a facility that will one day produce 50 to 100 million gallons of flex ethanol in the future.
I’ve been invited to take a tour of the facility today (after an epic 8-hour car ride, more on that later) to give you an inside look at the flex ethanol process. Turn the page to check out the full press release from Coskata.
Read more about the Coskata process here.
Source: Coskata
Awesome! You can stick a fork into two-thirds of the biofuel start-ups out there today. There are no enzymatic or pre-treatment processes that can compete with Coskata’s low development costs. Coupled with low demand for water, lack of hazardous by-products, and flexible feedstock, it’s going to rapidly dominate the biofuels industry in the coming years. Personally, I can’t wait for the IPO. Two things that I think would dramatically strengthen Coskata’s position, though.
First is to apply their process to municipal solid waste. Although they state that it can be done, it is more challenging due to the diverse mix of materials … metals, toxins, etc. If they can deal with those challenges without the need for expensive pre-sorting, it opens up a huge market for municipalities across the country.
Second would be to develop an alternative set of end products using the same up-front process. For example, several companies and universities are developing proprietary organisms that can produce a wide range of high-value chemicals for sale to other industries beyond biofuels. Still other companies are taking a similar approach to produce biodiesel. Syngas is a fairly generic mix of nutrients. By providing flexibility in their product mix, then can offer developers the potential to achieve higher profit margins from the same feedstock, depending on market demand, while simultaneously protecting themselves from variations in the ethanol market.
Pure smoke! The diverse feed mix they can do in a cost effective manner when they can’t do it with grain or corn alone?