Shell has bid $26 million to buy a Kansas cellulosic ethanol plant owned by the Spanish energy firm Abengoa, according to a bankruptcy court filing. Abengoa idled the plant in December 2015 and filed for bankruptcy protection two months later. The plant was the second commercial-scale cellulosic facility in the U.S., designed to convert agriculture waste into ethanol fuel via hydrolysis and fermentation. The first plant, operated by Poet-DSM in Iowa, opened just before Abengoa’s, in September 2014. A year later, DuPont started up a similar plant, also in Iowa. Abengoa’s bankruptcy was largely a result of a high debt load in its solar energy business, not the ethanol plant. Still, it is not clear how much—if any—ethanol the 95 million-L-per-year facility produced. The plant was built with the help of a $132 million loan guarantee and $97 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy. DOE reported that the