Coskata confirms 100 gallon per ton, ZeaChem confirms 135 gallon per ton, in advanced biofuels updates
In Washington, a conference call hosted by Bio offered an opportunity to catch up on metrics and timelines for three advanced biofuels companies — Coskata, ZeaChem and Myriant. With both Coskata (#6) and ZeaChem (#19) sitting atop the 50 Hottest Companies in Bioenergy rankings, the renewable chemicals developer Myriant is more of a mystery company in stealth mode by comparison.
Coskata confirmed, in what CMO Wes Bolsen termed a “Major win,” that the company has confirmed its 100 gallon per ton yields, achieved at the pilot scale, at its semi-works facility in Madison, Pennsylvania. The company has backed off from ambitions to reach 100 Mgy in capacity by 2012, and is now offering more specific guidance that it intends to reach 55 Mgy in capacity by 2012 in a facility “based in the southeast” that will utilize woody biomass as feedstock, and create up to 700 direct and indirect jobs. The feedstock-flexible company, which uses an advanced gasification technology, expects to rapidly commercialize, and has now completed final engineering designs for moving to full scale. Bolsen was bullish on the overall prospects for industry scale up, saying that that US can sustain 90 billion gallons of biofuels, based on a study from GM, BIO and Sandia.
Bolsen, asked about the EPA’s decision to reduce the cellulosic ethanol target from 100 million gallons to 6 million for 2010, predicted that the 2011 target of 250 million gallons will have to be waived and that, as for the 2012 target of 500 million gallons, “without a doubt, it will be waived.” He added that “It only takes three or four refineries to make up the 500 million gallons,” and said that near-term extension of the production tax credit, the introduction of an investment tax credit” were necessary tools to make scale-up happen.
Carrie Atiyeh’s, presenting for ZeaChem, reiterated the company’s gasification-fermentation hybrid system, and that it has confirmed its 135 gallons per ton of biomass yields in scale up exercises, which are confirming its production rates of acetic acids. Using natural micro-organisms called acetogens, ZeaChem’s cellulosic process converts biomass into acetic acid, and in ascend step to ethyl acetate, and brining hydrogen from its gasifier unit it converts ethyl acetate into ethanol. Because the acetogens do not produce CO2, the ZeaChem system recaptures carbon, accounting for its higher theoretical yields. Atiyeh’s confirmed the company’s focus on a long term fixed-price contracts for wood biomass, in this case hybrid poplar, which will be supplemented in its business plan with supplemental residues. The company is focused on its two-carbon platform of ethanol, acetic acid and ethyl acetates, but plans to eventually explore the 3-carbon platform of propylene and also the C4s with butanol and even a six-carbon hexanol. The current semi-works facility, with a capacity of 250,000 gallons, is being assembled and tested in Colorado before moving later this year to the site in Boardman, Oregon.
Myriant, presented by Corinne Young, converts biomass-based sugars into multiple high-value green chemicals and intermediates. It recently was the only green chemicals company to land a $50 million DOE Integrated Bioenergy grant, and the company will shortly move with that funding secured towards the production of succinic acid, a key green chemical building block for urethanes and other bio-based materials. The company’s 30 million pound facility in Lake Providence will be completed before then end of 2011, and the company has already secured LOIs with customers. Young approvingly quoted auto industry pioneer Henry Ford who predicted years ago that “biochemistry would intimately unite agriculture and industry.”
Starting off the call, BIO section EVP Brent Erickson compared the scale up of the advanced biofuels industry to the scale up and evolution of the oil industry which took place over 120 years as the industry moved through distillation, catalytic cracking, hydrotreating and reforming technologies, and said that the objective of the biofuels industry is “to compress 120 years into 20 years,” and that to do so, the industry needed policy support —”policy that is “consistent, sustained and diverse” in order to translate achievements in the labs to “steel in the ground.”
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