Colo. firm snares $100 million to finish biofuels plant

Gargi Chakrabarty

Wednesday, April 2, 2008

Range Fuels Inc. has raised more than $100 million in private funds, propelling the Broomfield company forward in its quest to turn wood waste into motor fuel.

Backed by Vinod Khosla, co-founder of Sun Microsystems and an ardent supporter of biofuels, Range Fuels said Tuesday the money will be spent completing a cellulosic ethanol plant under construction near Soperton, Ga.

The plant is scheduled to go online in 2009 and will produce 20 million gallons of ethanol annually during the first phase.

An air-quality and building permit allows the company to expand the plant to 120 million gallons a year.

"Range Fuels has an enormous market opportunity and is the company closest to commercializing cellulosic ethanol," said Walther Lovato, portfolio manager at Passport Capital, a San Francisco-based firm that led the private financing drive.

Lovato said Range Fuels will produce cheaper ethanol, compared with both corn ethanol and biochemical processes.

Investors include Khosla Ventures, Leaf Clean Energy Co., BlueMountain and Pacific Capital Group, with participation by the California Employee Retirement System.

Range Fuels in March 2007 received $76 million in grants from the U.S. Department of Energy, on top of $6 million from Georgia. It was among six companies developing biofuel technologies that got a total of $385 million in federal funds to help build their pilot projects.

The Department of Energy expects cellulosic ethanol, or ethanol derived from the nation's abundant forest byproducts, agricultural wastes or energy crops such as switchgrass, to be as cheap to produce as corn ethanol by 2012.

Academics, scientists and Wall Street investors are pouring millions of dollars into researching the fuel, convinced that cellulosic ethanol could replace the nation's oil purchases from foreign nations.

The United States has an estimated 1 billion tons of biomass available each year, enough to make 100 billion gallons of cellulosic ethanol. That potentially could replace a large percentage of the 140 billion gallons of gasoline the nation currently uses each year.

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

Range Fuels' decision to build its plant in Georgia, instead of Colorado, was mostly due to the large quantity of woody biomass available in the southern state.

Jim McMillan, a biofuels scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, suggested that Range Fuels' proprietary thermo-chemical technology is among the more promising for making cellulosic ethanol.

The technology involves gasifying biomass byproducts under intense heat and converting the synthetic gas into liquid fuel.

"They obviously haven't told us about their technology as much as their investors," McMillan said. "Obviously, people like what they are hearing and seeing."

chakrabartyg@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-2976

Range Fuels Inc.

* Headquarters: Broomfield

* Business: The company is building a cellulosic ethanol plant near Soperton, Ga., that will convert wood waste into motor fuel using a proprietary thermo-chemical technology. Once online in 2009, the plant will produce 20 million gallons of ethanol a year during the first phase.

* What's new: On Tuesday, the company said it has raised more than $100 million in private financing that will be used to complete the Soperton plant.

• April 2, 2008

  7:51 a.m.

  Suggest removal

  SASQUATCH writes:

  BIOFUELS: SCAM, HOAX AND BOONDAGLE:

  Time Magazine now joins the Christian Science Monitor, NYTimes, WSJ, IBD, Reason, and Rollingstone Magazine, in coming out against ethanol and biofuels in its most recent issue:

  Several new studies show the biofuel boom is doing exactly the opposite of what its proponents intended: it's dramatically accelerating global warming, imperiling the planet in the name of saving it. Corn ethanol, always environmentally suspect, turns out to be environmentally disastrous. Even cellulosic ethanol made from switchgrass, which has been promoted by eco-activists and eco-investors as well as by President Bush as the fuel of the future, looks less green than oil-derived gasoline.

  Meanwhile, by diverting grain and oilseed crops from dinner plates to fuel tanks, biofuels are jacking up world food prices and endangering the hungry. The grain it takes to fill an SUV tank with ethanol could feed a person for a year. Harvests are being plucked to fuel our cars instead of ourselves. The U.N.'s World Food Program says it needs $500 million in additional funding and supplies, calling the rising costs for food nothing less than a global emergency. Soaring corn prices have sparked tortilla riots in Mexico City, and skyrocketing flour prices have destabilized Pakistan, which wasn't exactly tranquil when flour was affordable.

  But the basic problem with most biofuels is amazingly simple, given that researchers have ignored it until now: using land to grow fuel leads to the destruction of forests, wetlands and grasslands that store enormous amounts of carbon.
  -----
  Make sure we all remember that Salazar and Ritter led Colorado's charge into this mindless hoax.

• April 8, 2008

  3:54 p.m.

  Suggest removal

  jwvau writes:

  I don't think the whole story is being told In these type articles

  When Coal or oil is used we are taking carbon from deep in the earth
  and releasing it into the atmosphere.

  When plants grow they take carbon from the atmosphere through the process of photosynthesis. If it is left in the field or woods to decay this carbon is released.

  If biomass is used as fuel the same carbon is released
  (The carbon taken from the atmosphere through photosynthesis and the same carbon that would have gone into the atmosphere had the biomass decayed.)