Colorado bullish on cellulosic ethanol

Gargi Chakrabarty, Rocky Mountain News

Published December 26, 2006 at midnight

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The U.S. could turn off the foreign oil spigots by making fuel out of cornstalks, stover, switch grass, straw or virtually any biomass.

Forget drilling thousands of oil and gas wells. Companies instead could gather the nation's abundant forest and agricultural wastes, process those to extract sugar and ferment the sugar to produce fuel.

It's called cellulosic ethanol, and some say it is the environmentally friendly way to feed the country's energy needs. The biggest hurdle is that it's substantially more expensive to make than traditional oil or even ethanol from corn.

Yuma County plans to have the state's, and possibly the nation's, first cellulosic ethanol plant. A Fort Lupton company is considering building a $50 million plant. Construction would begin by 2010, and the plant would pump out fuel the following year.

"Cellulosic technology allows the use of many, many different kinds of biomass, and we see it as where ethanol is headed," said Andrea Anderson, Yuma County's executive director.

Yuma is not the only one bullish about cellulosic ethanol.

Scientists, academics and Wall Street investors are pouring millions of dollars into researching the fuel, convinced that cellulosic ethanol could replace the United States' importation of petroleum from foreign nations.

The United States has an estimated 1 billion tons of biomass available each year, enough for 100 billion gallons of cellulosic ethanol. That potentially could replace nearly half the 140 billion gallons of gasoline the nation currently uses each year.

In contrast, traditional corn ethanol could at best replace only 20 billion gallons, about 14 percent of gasoline use a year, the U.S. Department of Energy estimates.

Currently, the nation's 105 corn- to-ethanol plants produce about 5 billion gallons a year.

President Bush has called for making cellulosic ethanol cost-competitive with corn-derived ethanol by 2012. Congress has mandated the production of 250 million gallons of cellulosic ethanol by 2013, which would require six to 10 commercial plants.

The United States does not have a commercial plant. But the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden is working hard and spending millions of dollars to make that happen.

"Corn is a very good source for ethanol, but there isn't enough corn to make an impact on the transportation fuel market," said Bob Wallace, a NREL engineer who has been researching cellulosic ethanol since 2001.

Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, recently told a congressional hearing that cellulosic ethanol is the only alternative fuel that could make a dent on the nation's oil consumption.

Big investors such as Virgin Atlantic's Richard Branson and former Sun Microsystems co-founder Vinod Khosla have jumped into the fray.

A few months ago, Goldman Sachs - the world's largest investment bank - pumped $27 million into Canadian company Iogen, which is on track to build a commercial cellulosic ethanol plant near Ottawa.

But the fuel has many challenges, namely the cost.

Cellulosic ethanol's production cost (excluding transportation, distribution and taxes) is $2.20 a gallon, twice the cost of traditional corn ethanol and nearly three times the pure production cost of gasoline.

The goal is to cut the cost in half and make it comparable to corn ethanol by 2012, Wallace said.

A lot of skepticism surrounds the economic viability of a commercial-scale plant. Scientists have researched cellulosic ethanol for more than 50 years, and there have been many false starts.

It doesn't help that many investors are waiting to see how the first commercial plant works before putting in their money, and the first plant has yet to come online.

"Nobody wants to build the first plant. They want to wait until there are three or four plants to make sure the process really works," said David Wilson, a molecular biology professor at Cornell University. "It is difficult to get a plant financed."

Unlike traditional ethanol made from corn, cellulosic ethanol requires a more complicated process.

Cornstalks, stover, wheat straw or other biomass feedstock is first pulverized and treated with enzymes, which breaks down the cellulose into sugars. The sugars are fermented and purified into ethanol.

A side benefit of the process is that the biomass used to create cellulosic ethanol contains lignin, a compound that can be separated out and burned to create energy.

Fort Lupton-based PureVision Technology is looking to build the state's first cellulosic ethanol plant in Yuma.

The company has received about $3 million from the U.S. Department of Energy over the past three years and plans to build a $5 million prototype next year.

The proposed plant in Yuma would be its first commercial project. The plant would complement Yuma's corn-to-ethanol plants, one under construction and the other on the drawing board.

Farmers and ranchers, along with Yuma County commissioners, have met with PureVision to discuss the plant.

An ongoing $50,000 study by PureVision will be completed in April, and that will be followed by a comprehensive analysis to determine details such as location of the plant, its capacity and the availability of feedstock from local farmers.

"It seems the community in Yuma is forward-thinking, and they believe a cellulosic ethanol plant would complement their corn-to- ethanol plant," said Ed Lehrburger, co-founder of PureVision. "But we'd have to raise more money before that."

chakrabartyg@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-2976

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