Greentech Media

Coskata is using liquid carbon dioxide, in cylinders borrowed from McDonald's, and methane from a natural-gas pipeline to create the synthesis gas its bacteria convert into ethanol. Because it is making such small amounts of ethanol in the labs, the company doesn't actually gasify feedstocks, such as wood chips or old tires, in these tests. "We don't need to reinvent gasification, but we do need to prove different [feedstocks] work with our system," Vice President Richard Tobey said.

Coskata is simulating gasification from different carbon-based feedstocks to test whether its bacteria can convert the different varieties of so-called "synthesis gas," which includes hydrogen and carbon monoxide.

In this room, Coskata is testing how different bacteria respond to different nutrients. The bacteria require different nutrients at different stages of life -- what Tobey compares to milk for babies and Ensure for the elderly - and the company wants to better understand their nutritional requirements. Because the bacteria -- which naturally occur in swamps -- are anaerobic, these "neonatal units" protect the bacteria from oxygen, Tobey said.

"This is the heart of Coskata's intellectual property," Tobey said, referring to the company's bioreactor development. The tubes behind the glass act as straws, allowing synthesis gas through while keeping water -- and trace minerals - in and sucking ethanol out so the bacteria aren't "living in their own waste." With this system, Coskata is trying to keep the maintenance cycle down to once a year, he said. The startup had reached 1,500 maintenance-free hours before leaving its place at Argonne National Labs and moving here in August.

Coskata's bacteria would form colonies in films in these tubes, so that scaling up will be a matter of replicating these tubes instead of making them bigger, Tobey said. "We can have 100 of those tubes in parallel," he said. "We're not going from a teeny tiny reactor to a gargantuan one. Quite honestly, the bacteria don't know how many there are."

Once extracted from the bioreactor, ethanol is piped to this device, which removes some of the water from the fuel.

Coskata is building a pilot plant that GM originally hoped would be up and running earlier this month. The startup says it expects to begin pilot production by the end of January or February and to complete a 40,000-gallon-per-year demonstration facility by the end of the year.

This room houses carbon-monoxide monitors as well as a catalytic converter. Any synthesis gas that isn't eaten by the bacteria gets run through the converter to avoid pollution, Tobey said.

Coskata plans to automate its ethanol-making process with robots in this room. "Much like the automotive industry, we want to use machines to [automate the process] so we can do thousands instead of hundreds [of colonies]," Tobey said. Also, while the company has a "laser focus" on ethanol right now, it plans to expand to other fuels and products. Some companies have asked about bioplastics, Tobey said, and co-founder Todd Kimmel said Coskata already has an organism that makes butanol.