A startup that’s using a microbe found in termite guts and soil to break down trees and plants into next-generation ethanol, has broken ground on its first demonstration plant. The company is 8-year-old ZeaChem, based in Menlo park, Calif., and on Wednesday afternoon the team held the official ground-breaking ceremony (complete with soil digging photo opp, see photo) for its planned 250,000 1.5 million-gallon-per-year demonstration plant in Boardman, Oregon. (Update: ZeaChem was planning to build a 1.5 million-per-year plant, but downgraded the plant size to 250,000 gallons-per-year).
The company is one of a dozen next-gen ethanol startups that are racing to build large plants in the U.S. in an attempt to be among the first to produce fuels from waste plants and energy crops as opposed to the dominant method today of using corn. Many of these startups have struggled to raise enough capital to build their first commercial plants, which cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and have failed to reach some of their commercialization deadlines. ZeaChem seems to be more on track than most.
ZeaChem uses a combination of biological processes to convert sugars into acetate. It then gasifies the remainder of the biomass, tough lignin and all, into hydrogen before mixing the two streams in a reaction called hydrogenolysis to produce ethanol. The company is first concentrating on poplar trees — one of the reasons it chose the Boardman, Ore., location — as a low cost feedstock, and ZeaChem has a deal with GreenWood Resources for its (sustainably harvested!) poplar supply.
ZeaChem says its process of converting plants and trees into ethanol produces 40 percent more ethanol per ton of biomass than any known competitor. That’s a bold claim, given the number of competitors (which includes startups Coskata, Mascoma and Range Fuels and larger companies like Iogen and Poet).
When I toured ZeaChem’s facilities a little over a year ago, they showed me the process and how the company was working on making the steps as low cost and efficient as possible. The point of the lab is to get the process ready for the demonstration plant in Boardman, and then for a larger 25-50 million gallon per year commercial scale plant down the road. ZeaChem CEO Jim Imbler described the multistep process in the lab to me as a set of Legos stacked on top of each other. The lab looked more like a complex metallic Erector Set, interspersed with test tubes and beakers filled with a murky brownish liquid that was in various stages of fermentation and purification.
ZeaChem has just started construction on its demonstration facility, so it clearly has a long way to go to reach commercialization. But it recently got some funding from the Department of Energy, in addition to venture capital and private equity funding from oil giant Valero Energy Corporation, Globespan Partners, PrairieGold Venture Partners (a South Dakota firm), Mohr Davidow Ventures and Firelake Capital.
For more on cleantech financing check out GigaOM Pro (subscription required):
{"source":"https:\/\/gigaom.com\/2010\/06\/03\/zeachem-breaks-ground-on-next-gen-ethanol-plant\/wijax\/49e8740702c6da9341d50357217fb629","varname":"wijax_282e587c41feda4f6967e4e98d84f461","title_element":"header","title_class":"widget-title","title_before":"%3Cheader%20class%3D%22widget-title%22%3E","title_after":"%3C%2Fheader%3E"}