Coskata Confirms 100 Gallon Per Ton, ZeaChem Confirms 135 Gallon Per ton, in Advanced Biofuels Updates

by Jim Lane (Biofuels Digest) ... 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.

...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.

...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. ... 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. READ MORE