Coskata’s $100 million IPO: The 10-Minute Version

by Jim Lane (Biofuels Digest) The first gas fermentation technology to come to the public markets: Coskata files its $100 million IPO. Here’s our 10-minute version of the filing, with a translation of the risks into English.

...Coskata, which in the past year lost $28.7 million while recording $250K in revenues becomes the 14th company to file for an IPO in the industrial biotech boom, which began with a successful listing on the NASDAQ by Codexis in 2010.

...From the S-1: “We are a technology leader in renewable fuels and bio-based chemicals. Our low-cost, proprietary process converts a wide variety of abundant feedstocks, such as woody biomass, agricultural residues, municipal wastes, natural gas and other carbon-containing materials, into fuels and chemicals. We have combined…synthesis gas production and cleaning…with our molecular biology and process engineering capabilities to create a synthesis gas fermentation platform.

“We operated a production facility at demonstration-scale for more than two years where we achieved what we believe to be the highest yield of cellulosic ethanol per bone dry ton of feedstock demonstrated at this scale. In 2012 we expect to begin constructing our first commercial-scale cellulosic ethanol production facility.

...The process is not dependent on sugar-based feedstocks or the use of enzymes and catalysts.

...In SECSpeak: “In place of the plasma gasifier that we used at our Lighthouse facility, we expect to integrate an indirect biomass gasifier with our syngas cleaning technology, which have never been tested together for fuels production. While biomass gasifiers are a proven technology, they have only been used commercially on a limited basis and have experienced operational reliability issues.”

In English: Uh, we didn’t actually use our proposed gasification machine, a/k/a/ Old Unreliable, because in the demonstration that we did, we decided to demonstrate something else.

...“We expect to use a wide variety of other feedstocks, in addition to woody biomass, for subsequent facilities, including municipal solid waste, agricultural residues, energy crops and fossil fuel sources…We also believe that corn ethanol producers can expand their capacity by co-locating our technology at their existing ethanol production facilities, since it would allow them to convert agricultural residue into cellulosic ethanol. READ MORE