MAR 17

Range Fuels has already begun building the country's first cellulosic ethanol plant in Georgia. The plant has a goal of producing 100 million gallons of ethanol per year using leftovers from Georgia's giant timber industry. Unfortunately, right now Range Fuels only has enough money to build 20 million gallons per year of capacity. The money to do that came mostly from government grants.

But now Range has announced that they've raised another $100 M from Khosla Ventures and an unnamed energy company. The injection of funds will allow range to meet it's 100 million gallon per year goal, hopefully by 2009.

Range's technology gasifies the plant cellulose using a technique created to turn coal into liquid fuel. After the gasification, turning the wood chips into ethanol is fairly trivial. Unfortunately, the process is much more expensive than the processes that turn corn into biofuel.

But the expense of the process, it turns out, is less important once corn prices start skyrocketing due to increase demands both for food and ethanol. Wood chips on the other hand are pretty much free. This is how Range hopes to make up the difference in cost, hopefully scaling up to the point where their ethanol is actually cheaper than both corn ethanol and gasoline.

$100 M definitely won't hurt their attempts to achieve this goal.

Via CNET Clean Tech

Comments (4)

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written by dodge charger running w/cellulosic ethanol, March 18, 2008

yeah! i hope that more cellulosic ethanol plants appear cuz thats the way to go!Plus, I want that the saudis to think "Why didnt we sent to them more oil??"

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A Good Start
written by EV, March 18, 2008

Nice. That's about 1.5 million barrels of oil. Here's to more cellulose ethanol plants.

Hmm... If we put some of these in upstate Maine and logged pine trees specifically for it, I think we'd have something going as well.

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Build more facilities far up north
written by Mark Konrad, March 21, 2008

With its enormous landmass and small population Canada has the potential to be the Saudi Arabia of cellulosic ethanol production. I'd like to see some long term planning and logical thinking from investors and CE facilities builders in the States. In my opinion it would make sense to construct facilities as close to the Canadian border as possible in order to encourage the Canadians to grow and sell us their biomass. That strategy would also provide a fast answer to the naysayers who claim there isn't enough land available in the U.S. to grow enough biomass to attain self-sufficiency. I don't believe that's the case anyway, but if the Canadians saw a commitment to CE fuel usage in the USA farmers and growers there would certainly get into the biomass business, and they could sell us plenty.

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What about Russia?
written by Matt Hawthorn, July 14, 2008

Surely this technology would be ideal for Russia and the huge forests of Eastern Europe, it could be piped through the existing pipelines.
CE could create a value which might enable the extending of the Siberian forests, and re-establish some natural habitats.

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