The Death of Range Fuels Shouldn't Doom All Biofuels

by Kevin Bullis (MIT Technology Review) This month, Range Fuels, one of the first companies in a wave of startups that promised cheap biofuels made from sources such as wood chips rather than corn, shut its doors for good and was forced to auction off its assets.

The company failed for many reasons, but the biggest seems to be that its technology proved too expensive, something that experts say shouldn't be a surprise, since it was similar to other technologies with well-known problems.

Range Fuels benefited from being an "early mover" in the field, says David Berry, a partner at the venture capital firm Flagship Ventures. "It got a lot of attention, and so it was well positioned to raise a bunch of money. The reality was, the technology couldn't quite keep up with the attention," he says. "That led to the company's demise."

Range Fuels, which had planned to turn wood chips into ethanol, received substantial attention in 2006, after President Bush declared in his State of the Union Address that the United States was "addicted to oil" and pointed to "cutting-edge methods of producing ethanol, not just from corn, but from wood chips and stalks, or switchgrass."

By the following year, Range Fuels had received a $76 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy and had broken ground on a commercial-scale plant in Soperton, Georgia. That plant was designed to produce 20 million gallons of fuel a year at first, and eventually 100 million gallons.

...One possible problem, says Helena Chum, a research fellow at NREL, is tar formation during the gasification step, something that has plagued similar attempts at gasification by Georgia Pacific and other companies. "Even if it's a small amount in experiments, when you go into industrial production, it becomes an enormous amount to deal with," Chum says. The problem was known to researchers, she says, "but technology developers sometime ignore research results in trying to move fast."

Chum says other problems can arise from gasifying biomass—including the presence of inorganic impurities and irregular proportions of the gases formed, which requires modifying catalysts and processes, all of which can be expensive and time-consuming.

...The system for feeding biomass to the gasifiers, which Range Fuels bought from a supplier, could only provide enough to supply one of the company's two gasifiers, while the other stood idle. READ MORE