Coskata has gotten a letter of intent from the U.S. Department of Agriculture for a $250 million loan guarantee to build a plant to make ethanol from woody biomass. The plant will have the capacity to make 55 million gallons per year. Coskata’s plant plans seriously stalled during the recession, and Coskata has been waiting for this loan guarantee to come through. The company is well-known for touting a $1 per gallon production price and its backers including Khosla Ventures, General Motors, and Advanced Technology Ventures.

The USDA also awarded Enerkem a conditional commitment for an $80 million loan guarantee to build a 10 million-gallon-per-year refinery for making ethanol out of municipal solid waste. Enerkem, which uses a thermochemical trash-to-syngas process, was already awarded a $50 million Department of Energy grant, and also raised funding from trash giant Waste Management, Cycle Capital, Rho Ventures, Braemar Energy Ventures and BDR Capital.

At the same time, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is awarding a $241 million loan guarantee — its first for a biofuel plant — to Diamond Green Diesel. The guarantee will help Valero build a plant in Louisiana that will make 137 million gallons of biofuel per year primarily from animal fats and used cooking oil.

The USDA said it’s not done doling out financial help to biofuel producers. It plans to announce new rules “soon” that will make more money available from the loan guarantee program, which originated from a 2008 Farm Bill.

Lining up money to build refineries has been a huge hurdle for a slew of biofuel companies in the past two years. The recession is only partly to blame. Many of these companies have encountered technical problems for converting plants and wastes into fuel. Investors once flocked to these startup companies, especially when the federal government announced goals to gradually increase the nation’s supply of renewable fuel until it hits 36 billion in 2022.

Well, hitting the goals has proven a lot more difficult. Congress initially set 100 million gallons as the 2010 target for cellulosic biofuel, but the Environmental Protection Agency cut that to 6.5 million gallons. It appears the industry might have produced less than 1 million gallons last year, reported ClimateWire, citing an estimate by a government analyst.

Just last week, reports emerged that Range Fuels, backed by venture capital firms such as Khosla Ventures, was laying off workers and shutting down its refinery in Georgia in order to tackle technical problems and raise more money. Colorado-based Range Fuels received an $80 million loan guarantee from the USDA to help fund its refinery, which began production by making methanol instead of ethanol last year.

Perhaps the USDA will see quicker success from its latest bets. Aside from Coskata and Enerkem, the agency also touted a loan guarantee conditional commitment for a $75 million loan guarantee to INEOS Bio and its partner New Planet Energy, which it first announced a few weeks ago.

INEOS Bio (which is the biofuel arm of petrochemical giant INEOS) and developer New Planet Energy say they will use the loan guarantee to build the “INEOS BioEnergy Center,” near Vero Beach, Florida, that will produce 8 million gallons of advanced biofuels and 6 MW of biomass power from plant waste and trash per year. The companies say the center will begin producing biofuels and bioenergy in 2012, and will create 175 jobs during the construction process and 50 jobs when the center is completed.

Loan guarantees are important awards for companies looking to build plants for these next-gen biofuel projects. A loan guarantee essentially is a promise by the government to back a loan if the company can’t pay it, and it enables companies to finance projects with a better interest rate and at a lower cost.

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There was good reason to expect a lower valuation from the Englewood, Colo.-based startup, Lux research analyst Samhitha Udupa told us in August. The company generated $660,000 and lost $19.89 million in 2009, and had accumulated a deficit of $50.3 million as of March 31, 2010. Still, Lux has put Gevo among its top-ranked biofuel startups for the past two years, giving it high marks for its innovative retrofit model toward cheaper production costs.

Gevo, which has backing from Khosla Ventures and Virgin Green Fund, wants to retrofit old corn ethanol plants to turn cellulosic feedstocks like agriculture waste into isobutanol, a fuel additive and precursor to plastics and other products. The startup is retrofitting an ethanol plant in Luverne, Minn. to produce about 18 million gallons of isobutanol per year, and says its retrofit model could allow it to scale up to 50 million gallons-per-year for about $24 million, or 100 million gallons for $40 million to $45 million.

Empty ethanol plants aren’t necessarily hard to come by — oil refining giant Valero bought up seven plants from bankrupt corn-to-ethanol maker VeraSun in 2009. If Gevo meets its new IPO targets, it could command a market value of $349 million, according to Renaissance Capital. The company booked $2 million in sales for the fiscal year ending in September 2010 and has said it has letters of intent from customers including chemical company Lanxess, French oil giant Total’s subsidiary Total Petrochemicals USA, plastic maker Toray Industries, airline company United Air Lines and oil industry technology developer CDtech.

One big question is whether Gevo will tackle the biofuel market right away, or focus on providing isobutanol for the plastics and chemicals industries. The company got EPA clearance to sell its isobutanol as a fuel additive in November, but it is also looking to supply makers of plastics, fibers, rubber and other polymers.

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Report author Andrew Soare interviewed more than 300 executives for the report, and finds that startups in the field have started to distinguish themselves as winners or losers in terms of larger rounds of investment and corporate partnerships. At the same time, startups are changing their game plans to better fit the difficult market, shifting focus to specialty chemicals and postponing plans for mass-producing biofuels that will have to compete against oil on price.

So who’s on top? As with its report last year on the biofuel sector, Lux pulls together data on revenue per employee, patents, performance metrics, production capacity and the like to place contenders in terms of maturity and potential. Winners in both categories included net-generation biofuel stock market bellwether Amyris, cellulosic waste-to-isobutanol startup Gevo, algae-to-fuel startup Solazyme, long-time cellulosic ethanol developers Mascoma and Poet, and two startups making succinic acid and butanol — U.S.-Canadian firm BioAmber (formerly DNP Green Technology) and China’s Cathay Biotechnologies.

As for low-ranking companies, Lux didn’t pull punches, putting some dozen little-known names in its immature, unpromising quadrant, indicating the judgment that they’re “highly risky as investment, licensing, partnership, or merger and acquisition target(s).” Those included two “caution” warnings for U.K.-based ethanol producer TMO Renewables and French biocatalyst developer Proteus.

Many of the top-ranking startups have deep partnerships with established players in the field. Cellulosic ethanol maker Mascoma just got $50 million from oil refining giant Valero to build a plant in Michigan, along with an agreement to buy the fuel from it. Amyris has backing from French oil giant Total and P&G, Gevo has letters of intent from Total subsidiary Total Petrochemicals and United Air Lines, and Solazyme has investment from Chevron and a partnership with European food and consumer products giant Unilever.

They’re not alone, of course. Craig Venter’s Synthetic Genomics got $300 million from ExxonMobil for algae biofuel research, LS9 has backing from Chevron and products giant Procter & Gamble, and Codexis has pharmaceutical partnerships and a piece of Shell’s massive Brazilian biofuel partnership.

The Lux report breaks down startups according to technologies: fermentation, gasification, synthetic biology, chemical processes, crop enhancement, and algae processes. Some headline-level conclusions include:

• Fermentation’s digestion is improving. Companies like TetraVitae and Genomatica are engineering organisms that can eat more and more feedstocks and pump out more and more valuable chemicals, like succinic acid and butanol. Companies emerging from the biotechnology sector like Amyris and Verdezyne are also producing interesting new chemicals.
• Gasification is good for waste. It looks like heat beats bugs for converting trash into useful hydrocarbons. Even though that uses a lot more energy, it could be worth its while if startups can squeeze efficiencies out of the process. And remember that trash doesn’t cost anything — in fact, processors can usually get paid by the ton for taking it off the hands of government and private trash management authorities.
• Algae hasn’t proven anything yet. Lux says that only a handful of algae-based biofuel startups will survive — the report singles out Solazyme and Algenol — amidst a host of competitors that haven’t solved the key problems of harvesting and processing algae in a cost-effective manner.

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Image courtesy of Argonne National Laboratory via Creative Commons license.

The story quoted Bud Klepper, who’s not only Range Fuels’ technical advisor but also the original founder of the company that became Range Fuels (previously called Kergy). Klepper told the publication that Range Fuels is laying off most of its employees at its plant near Soperton, Ga, after it makes a single batch of ethanol, and the company will shut down the plant while it tackles technical problems and raises more money.

We guess that when the company told us earlier this week that it expected to start producing ethanol this week, it really meant it would produce just a single batch, followed by throwing in the towel on the plant and workers. That’s kind of like saying I’m going to start writing my novel this week, and then typing the title and calling it a day.

Range Fuels company spokesman Patrick Wright told us earlier this week that the company was letting go “a handful of people in Colorado and Georgia,” but he declined to disclose the number or reasons. Wright also said the company plans to meet a 2011 production goal set by the U.S. Environmental Agency.

Range Fuels, which is backed by investors including Khosla Ventures, has gotten quite a bit of public money to get its first commercial plant up and running. The U.S. Department of Energy awarded the company a grant of $76 million in 2007 to finance the Georgia plant. The U.S. Department of Agriculture approved a loan guarantee of $80 million, and that allowed the company to secure an $80 million bond in 2010 to fund the plant’s construction as well.

In between, the company raised a private B round of over $100 million from investors including Khosla, Passport Capital, BlueMountain, Leaf Clean Energy Company and Pacific Capital Group (with participation by the California Employee Retirement System).

Range Fuels is one of five companies that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has projected will be able to contribute to a total of 6.6 million gallons of cellulosic biofuel in 2011. A 2007 law required that the EPA set mandates for different types of fuels that can be blended into gasoline and diesel. Those mandates are supposed to lead the country to produce 36 billion gallons in 2022. Lawmakers nurtured ambitious goals to wean the country off the use of fossil fuels for transportation.

However, meeting those goals has proven clearly proven to be extremely difficult, mainly because many biofuel companies with promising technologies ran into technical problems or were unable to raise the hundreds of millions of dollars needed to build a commercial plant. Or both.

Congress initially set 100 million gallons as the 2010 target for cellulosic biofuel, but the EPA cut that to 6.5 million gallons. It appears that the industry might have produced less than 1 million gallons last year, reported ClimateWire on Tuesday, citing an estimate by a government analyst.

The EPA expects Range Fuels to produce 100,000 gallons of cellulosic ethanol and 2.9 million gallons of methanol at its Georgia plant in 2011. Although methanol doesn’t meet the current definition of cellulosic biofuel, the EPA said it’s considering changing that. The agency already counted Range Fuels’ projected methanol production in its 2011 goal.

Range Fuels began producing methanol last summer. At the time, Aldous said the plant had “less than 10 million gallons” of annual production capacity, but the plan was to expand it to 60 million gallons. Construction was to start this summer.

Aldous told the Colorado newspaper the Daily Camera this week that the recession and what he called a “public apathy toward green fuels” have hampered the company’s progress. The newspaper also said there was a “problem with the feed system at its plant.”

Aside from Range Fuels, the other four producers that could contribute to the 2011 pool are DuPont Danisco, Fiberight, KL Energy and KiOR.

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The wind industry had close to $4.8 billion in transaction value in 2010, which included private fund-raising deals, initial public offerings, and mergers and acquisitions. Solar generated a transaction value of $3.2 billion, and energy efficiency, which includes smart grid and LED lighting companies, followed with $2.5 billion.

The transaction values run parallel to the cleantech investing numbers for 2010, which found that solar startups continued to draw the most money in venture capital investment last year, while energy-efficiency startups garnered the largest number of deals, according to the Cleantech Group. However, given utility-scale wind is a more matured market, there are fewer investments in next wind technology startups.

A bulk of the transaction value that went to wind was for building energy generation projects, the report noted. An analysis by the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) showed that wind energy companies had grabbed the most money from a Treasury Department program that was set up in 2009 to subsidize renewable energy generation construction. As of November of last year, money that went to wind companies accounted for 85 percent of what the government had given out (solar took 8 percent).

In terms of the number of deals, the energy efficiency sector took the top spot, garnering 104 deals (fundraising rounds and M&A) last year, the Peachtree report said. Solar ranked second with 99 deals, followed by wind with 35 deals.

The report surmised that the strong interest in energy efficiency companies and projects will continue partly because they require less money and give quicker returns than more capital-intensive businesses such as solar and biofuel. Apparently, psychology also played a role, the report said, noting that many so-called energy-efficiency technologies are formerly called information technology and many investors came from the IT world.

Overall, $14.7 billion flowed into 371 fund-raising deals and mergers and acquisitions across all greentech sectors in 2010, and that reflected a 55-percent jump from 2009. Fund-raising deals, including equity investments in companies or projects, totaled $10.1 billion, a 65-percent hike from 2009. Mergers and acquisitions accounted for $4.6 billion in 2010, a 37 percent increase from the previous year.

So who are the losers? Bioenergy firms such as makers of biofuels to power cars. About $1.4 billion flowed into that sector, a 27-percent decline from 2009. Investors showed a strong interest in biofuel a few years back, when gasoline prices jumped dramatically and lawmakers began to approve policies and funds to jumpstart this new industry.

It has become painfully clear since then that figuring out how to make fuels from plants is trickier and takes more time and money than many had anticipated. Many companies have pushed back the time they will start mass-producing biofuels, prompting the government to dramatically scale back its expectation of gradually replacing fossil fuel with more renewable sources.

The energy storage sector, meanwhile, saw a 40-percent drop in deal values. But the report said the number is skewed by A123 Systems’ $378 million IPO in 2009, therefore, the storage business actually had a good year in 2010. Other fields that received less money included ocean and tidal power, carbon capture and sequestration, hydrogen and fuel cell technologies.

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Photo courtesy of Christopher Chappelear

Six-year-old Mascoma has long been one of the more promising cellulosic ethanol startups. Lux Research went so far as to give Mascoma “top chef status” in a biofuel ranking report last year, citing Mascoma’s “strong financial support from investors,” and “potentially cost-cutting” process for breaking down cellulose and fermenting the sugar with a single microbe.

That strong investor support includes close to $100 million (before Valero) from a long list of investors including Khosla Ventures, Flagship Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, VantagePoint, General Catalyst Partners, Atlas Venture, Pinnacle Ventures and car company General Motors. In addition to private funds, Mascoma has received numerous grants from the DOE totaling more than $30 million and also state grants from New York and Michigan of over $30 million.

Still, with all that support, Mascoma’s commercial-scale ethanol plant in Kinross was originally planned to begin construction sometime in 2009, with cellulosic ethanol production starting perhaps by 2011. Now, according to the release this morning, the facility will break ground in 2011. Pretty much every cellulosic ethanol company has had to delay commercial-scale production due to a variety of factors like the economy, and an inability to get the manufacturing costs low enough.

The Environmental Protection Agency didn’t include Mascoma in its short list of cellulosic ethanol producers that would produce fuel in 2011 — that list included Range Fuels, DuPont Danisco, Fiberight, KL Energy, and KiOR. Though the EPA says that many more companies, including 20 plants, could produce potentially 300 million gallons of cellulosic ethanol in 2012.

Valero has turned out to be one of the more aggressive oil firms in biofuels. The oil refiner took stakes in algae fuel maker Solix Biofuels, and cellulosic ethanol maker ZeaChem, and also bough up the the corn ethanol plants of bankrupt ethanol producer VeraSun. Other oil companies that have shown an interest in biofuels include Exxon (and its Synthetic Genomics deal) and BP, which bought up Verenium’s biofuel business.

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News about the layoffs emerged Monday, and company spokesman Patrick Wright confirmed it with us. Wright said the company laid off “a handful of people in Colorado and Georgia,” but declined to disclose the number or reasons. In the same email reply, Wright said that the company could possibly start producing ethanol this week at its plant near Soperton, Ga.

“The Soperton plant is running and is producing methanol and we expect to produce ethanol this week,” Wright wrote Tuesday. In a phone conversation, Wright said the company plans to meet a 2011 production goal set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. He declined to answer more questions about the company’s ethanol production plan. We’ll update the story if we hear more.

Range Fuels is one of the five companies the EPA projected will be able to produce 6.6 million gallons of cellulosic biofuel in 2011. A 2007 law required the EPA to set mandates for different types of fuels that can be blended into gasoline and diesel. Those mandates are supposed to lead the country to produce 36 billion gallons in 2022.

Lawmakers nurtured ambitious goals to wean the country off the use of fossil fuels. But meeting those goals has proven extremely difficult, mainly because many biofuel companies with promising technologies ran into technical problems or were unable to raise the hundreds of millions of dollars needed to build a commercial plant. Or both.

Congress initially set the 2010 target for cellulosic biofuel at 100 million gallons, but the EPA cut that to 6.5 million gallons. It appears the industry might have produced less than 1 million gallons last year, reported ClimateWire Tuesday, citing an estimate by a government analyst. EPA’s estimates are partly based on input from biofuel producers.

The EPA expects Range Fuels to produce 100,000 gallons of cellulosic ethanol and 2.9 million gallons of methanol at its Georgia plant in 2011. Although methanol doesn’t meet the current definition of cellulosic biofuel, the EPA said it’s considering changing that. The agency already counted the projected methanol production for Range Fuels in its 2011 goal. The company is using wood wastes as the primary feedstock.

Aside from Range Fuels, the other four producers that could contribute to the 2011 pool are DuPont Danisco, Fiberight, KL Energy and KiOR.

Range Fuels began producing methanol last summer. At the time, Aldous said the plant had “less than 10 million gallons” of annual production capacity, but the plan was to expand it to 60 million gallons. Construction was to start this summer.

Aldous told Colorado newspaper the Daily Camera this week that the recession and what he called a “public apathy toward green fuels” have hampered the company’s progress. “The critical issue is really that there’s no mechanism to price carbon today,” he told the newspaper. The newspaper also reported that there was a “problem with the feed system at its plant.”

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Photo courtesy of Nancy Qian

Duke Energy said this weekend that it will buy Progress Energy in an all-stock transaction (for a value of $13.7 billion) making the combined companies the largest utility in the U.S. by market cap. At the same time, Monday morning U.S. chemical giant DuPont said it will buy Danish enzyme company Danisco for $6.3 billion.

Clearly these are very different moves — and markets — but both acquisitions are indicative of how in very capital-intensive businesses like energy generation and fuels/chemicals, the ability to scale means everything. The larger the scale, often times the lower the cost of the product per MW or per gallon (clean power, biofuel).

The Wall Street Journal quotes UBS analyst Jim von Riesemann as saying the new massive utility will have the largest regulated nuclear portfolio in the U.S. and will help Progress Energy with “needed scale and scope to lower its cost structure.” A large nuclear power plant can cost $10 billion to build.

Likewise, DuPont gains Danisco’s sizable divisions for food ingredients, enzymes and bio-products, complementing the companies’ previously launched joint venture DuPont Danisco Cellulosic Ethanol, which is making cellulosic ethanol from waste and non-edible plant parts in the U.S. Commercial cellulosic ethanol plants can cost hundreds of millions of dollars to build, and need to produce biofuel competitive with the cost of corn ethanol and fossil fuels.

The EPA found that DuPont Danisco Cellulosic Ethanol — along with four other firms including Range Fuels, Fiberight, KL Energy, and KiOR — will be the only companies that will be able to produce a combined 6 million cellulosic ethanol-equivalent gallons in the U.S. in 2011. Expect the new DuPont Danisco to move ahead in this slow-moving cellulosic ethanol race, now that it’s just got a bigger combined backer.

What does this mean for the startups selling to the utility? For smart grid and smart energy startups, large utilities want to buy from large companies. The common wisdom is small startups need to either partner with some big vendors (Siemens, ABB, GE, etc.) to sell into the utility world, or get ready to lose deals to bigger competitors.

Once consolidation starts in a sector, it leads to . . . more consolidation. Competitors naturally bulk up to compete with the combined firms. Will 2011 bring the year of Godzilla greentech firms?

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Now that 4Loko isn’t contributing to the waking drunk syndrome across college campuses in the nation, the drink can get dumped into the beleaguered U.S. ethanol industry. Even Al Gore recently admitted the massive subsidies that the U.S. government has given to the corn ethanol crew were a mistake. Next-gen biofuel makers, on the other hand, contend that corn ethanol is a stepping stone to future, more sustainable biofuels.

But those next-gen biofuels constantly seem years — if not decades — away. In 2010, the Environmental Protection Agency had to once again scale back its biofuel mandates, partly because the EPA found in its final rule-making that cellulosic ethanol companies in the U.S. would not be able to produce the projected amount. Originally, the mandate called for 100 million gallons of cellulosic ethanol to be produced in 2010, but companies have produced basically none.

For 2011, the EPA projects that five companies — Range Fuels, DuPont Danisco, Fiberight, KL Energy, and KiOR — will only be able to produce 6 million cellulosic ethanol-equivalent gallons. However, in 2012, the EPA projects that many more companies, including 20 plants, could produce potentially 300 million gallons of cellulosic ethanol in 2012. Is the EPA being misled, yet again, by too-eager, too-ambitious companies?

The next-generation of biofuels won’t come from 4Loko. But when it comes to recycled trash and plant waste, that could be a huge opportunity. Last year, massive trash company Waste Management invested in cellulosic ethanol startup Enerkem, which gasifies various forms of waste — everything from old telephone poles to mixed municipal garbage — then turns it into syngas and then various fuels.

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INEOS Bio (which is the biofuel arm of petrochemical giant INEOS) and developer New Planet Energy say they will use the loan guarantee to build the “INEOS BioEnergy Center,” near Vero Beach, Florida, that will produce 8 million gallons of advanced biofuels and 6 MW of biomass power from plant waste and trash per year. The companies say the center will begin producing biofuels and bioenergy in 2012, and will create 175 jobs during the construction process and 50 jobs when the center is completed.

There’s very little next-gen biofuels being produced in the U.S. right now. Basically zero cellulosic ethanol was produced in 2010. The EPA projects that in 2011 five companies — Range Fuels, DuPont Danisco, Fiberight, KL Energy, and KiOR — will only be able to produce 6 million cellulosic ethanol-equivalent gallons.

As I wrote in my biofuel 2010 year in review article, I think so-called trash to energy technology will one day be a massive opportunity, and one that has been under invested in in the U.S. Trash company Waste Management, startup Enerkem, and company Fiberight, have all been pursuing ways to separate waste streams and produce biofuels efficiency and economically, and make progress in 2010.

Loan guarantees are important awards for companies looking to build plants for these next-gen biofuel projects. A loan guarantee essentially is a promise by the government to back a loan if the company can’t pay it, and it enables companies to finance projects with a better interest rate and at a lower cost.

In early 2009, cellulosic ethanol startup Range Fuels announced it had secured one of the first loan guarantees from the USDA for cellulosic ethanol. The loan guarantee was an $80 million commitment to help the company finish construction of its commercial scale plant near Soperton, Georgia.

So when will the DOE’s loan guarantee program back some biofuels projects? DOE loan chief Jonathan Silver told us that the “first couple biofuels deals” will be announced, “shortly,” and that biofuels will likely be among the next several loan guarantees.

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