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This plant is going to take in wood waste. Is that going to expand to other feedstocks?

Our technology has been tested with close to 30 different types of feedstock, including switchgrass, and bagasse, and municipal waste, and manures and the like. So we have a lot of flexibility in feedstock, again, unlike enzymatic approaches where those bugs are targeted to one particular feedstock.

We do have a variety of feedstocks we can use, and over time we will. But we look over the southeast, there's such an abundant supply of wood material down here and woody biomass resources that it can just supply, literally, through the southeast, billions and billions of gallons of cellulosic ethanol.

So we're going to probably stay in the South for a while—Georgia, other states as well—and take advantage of the existing timber infrastructure in these states, and the proximity to wood product. You don't want to build these plants so you have to truck product and feedstock a long way.

What's also great about the South is that we're very close to blenders. So we don't have to worry about these unit trains going out of the Midwest, and going from coast to coast 1,500 miles to get the ethanol onto the markets. We'll be able to blend locally, and use the ethanol in a blended gasoline right in the southeast.

What's the timeline on this project?

If you go back to the early corn ethanol days, a lot of those plants started around 10, 20 million gallons or so, going up to 100 today.

We'll start with 20, and we're targeting construction complete for the first 20 by the end of '08. And then, our technology is modular, so we just add additional modules to the 20 million base. We're sited and permitted for a 100 million gallon plant.

And then we'll go out and, of course, start building additional plants throughout the southeast.

Do you have an overall goal in terms of how many gallons you want to produce?

We'd like to see us get to a billion gallons really as fast as we can, and we believe that we'll scale this technology worldwide.

We won't just be deploying it in the U.S.; there's a lot of opportunity on other continents throughout the world.

We want to see ourselves get to billions of gallons in a very short period of time once we prove it.

Do you plan on building more than 100 million gallon plants?

The plant in Soperton, for example, at that site has such an abundance of sustainable, renewable feedstock that it could be much larger than it is today, at 100 million. There's no reason we can't make that plant larger than that.

There's also no reason why we wouldn't be able to put plants at smaller scale if the feedstock was more limited, maybe in the use of municipal waste, as an example. Maybe you don't have a renewable supply and a sustainable supply that can support more than a 20 or 40 million gallon module, and so we would just put that in a location like that. But if it can support 100 or 200 million gallon modules, we could do that as well.

We'll learn more over time about where the right site locations are and what the right economics are, but today we're targeting these, most likely, these 100 million gallon a year plants. But we have variability up the chain and down it.

What's the physical size of these plants?

I think if you look at a 100 million gallon a year facility, in acreage you're probably using around 40 or 50 acres for all of that, looking at material handling and trucking in the feedstock, and all the truck out and or rail. We have the opportunity to ship our product out to the local blenders using rail and or truck.

It's relatively modest in its overall footprint. The site we have in Soperton is actually several hundred acres, but we're protecting a lot of that in wetlands, and in open space around the plant where we're going to protect the forests all around the plant. We have an environmental sensitivity to the community here, so we took on a lot more acreage than we need.

How's your funding situation?

As we currently sit, we're fine. Over time you'll continue to look for funding down the road, but today we're backed by Khosla, we have the DOE, and we're in good shape.