Breaking Ground on Cellulosic Ethanol

The Range Fuels plant, to be located in southeast Georgia, could be producing ethanol as soon as next year. It's being funded by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) as part of the agency's effort to increase the use of biofuels. The DOE is providing a total of $76 million to the company for the construction of its new plant. At first, it will produce 20 million gallons, eventually increasing that amount to 100 million.

Almost all of the more than five billion gallons of ethanol produced in the United States has been made from cornstarch. But ethanol from cellulosic sources is an attractive alternative because it could potentially require less fossil-fuel energy to produce, and its supplies of biomass are vast. Indeed, if biofuels are ever to displace more than about 10 percent of gasoline in the United States, cellulosic ethanol will be essential. But making ethanol from cellulosic biomass is much more difficult than making it from cornstarch. And the process for converting biomass into biofuels has not been economically viable.

However, Range Fuels CEO Mitch Mandich says that the company can produce ethanol at prices competitive with corn-based ethanol--even factoring in the high capital costs associated with building a cellulosic-biofuel plant. Range Fuels has developed a two-step thermochemical process for converting wood chips and other types of biomass into a combination of alcohols that include ethanol, methanol, propanol, and butanol. In the first step, called gasification, heat, pressure, and steam convert biomass into a mixture of primarily hydrogen and carbon monoxide. This gas mixture, called syngas, is then exposed to catalysts that convert it into alcohols. The process is similar to the Fischer-Tropsch process that has been used for decades to convert coal into liquid fuels.

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