CELLULOSIC TEST BED

Abstract

AT COSKATA’S SITE in Madison, Pa., workers in hard hats, surrounded by loud mechanical humming, walk through a towering maze of reactors, tanks, pipes, and gauges. This hustle and bustle makes a point: Cellulosic ethanol has escaped the lab. The biofuels start-up is producing ethanol from wood chips in a semicommercial plant sited at a Westinghouse complex. On a recent tour for reporters, Coskata executives were on hand to show how far they’ve come and to explain how they plan to scale up the company’s process to make cellulose-based ethanol that is price-competitive with gasoline. Most cellulosic ethanol companies on the cusp of commercialization—a list that includes Poet, Iogen, Verenium, Mascoma, and Range Fuels—use either thermochemical or biochemical processes to break down cellulose and transform it into ethanol. Coskata, in contrast, has selected one of each type of process: gasification to break down the carbon feedstock and microbial fermentation to turn it into ethanol. “What ...