Coskata has announced
the location of its 40,000 square foot, $25 million pilot plant. The cellulosic ethanol fab will located at the Westinghouse Plasma Center, about 30 miles south of Pittsburgh in Madison, PA, and will be co-located with the Westinghouse Plasma Corp.'s plasma gasifier - a move that gives more clues about Coskata's production process. Plasma torches at the new site will heat feedstock - woody biomass, industrial waste, kitchen sinks, etc. - to 1,600º F, hot enough to gasify any carbon-based input. The torches themselves, the WPC Marc-3, are a smaller version of
the WPC Marc-11, which are popular with the foundry crowd and which Coskata will use in its larger facilities. After conversion through gasification, the syngas is cooled to 100º F and the company's proprietary microbes have at it, consuming carbon monoxide and hydrogen in the waste stream. Finally, the ethanol is separated out, creating a liquid fuel an energy potential 7.7 times greater than the energy used to create it.
Hopefully GM won't screw this one up.
One way that's possible is for GM to help move Coskata's ethanol into the downstream market. Distribution continues to be a large problem facing ethanol makers. This morning, however, a leading producer finally decided to do something about it.
Cosan Ltd., Brazil's largest ethanol producer, has struck an $826 million deal with ExxonMobil to buy up all the Esso stations in Brazil. The deal, which covers 1,500 gas stations in 20 states, is the first major move by an ethanol maker into the downstream market. Tensions between downstream oil companies and upstream ethanol makers peaked recently, as
ethanol use surged passed gasoline use in Brazil during February and March. BP has taken the opposite tack,
recently acquiring a 50 percent stake worth $560 million in Tropial BioEnergia, a Brazilian joint venture, and committing another $1 billion to build capacity in the country equal to 1 billion liters of ethanol a year by 2010.
Majors moves by distributors and manufacturers into opposite market ends point to a maturation of the Brazilian ethanol industry. "
It's a natural trend toward consolidation in the ethanol sector," said Julio Maria Borges, an ethanol consultant. "In ten years we'll see 1 billion tons of cane with only 20 industrial groups," compared to the 350 in operation now. In this way, ethanol companies are beginning to behave like oil companies, seeking vertically-integrated operations that reduce costs across the production chain. This will increase the amount of refined ethanol, while also increasing its commodification versus other globally-traded fuels like petroleum and natural gas. One downside of this producer-pushed expansion is the possibility for ethanol,
like natural gas, to begin tracking oil prices. Another problem with reliance on ethanol is the susceptibility of the feedstock to climate change. Increasingly hot or arid growing seasons may become a big problem for this industry, making it doubtful whether ethanol can save itself.
But, as energy companies in Germany and Italy are finding out, sometimes even regulation isn't enough to get over the problem of scale. The New York Times reports this week that rising oil and natural gas prices have pushed 
Is it possible Google has started to make good on its 
