Range Fuels to produce 1B gallons of cellulosic ethanol

Range Fuels is planning to build a cellulosic ethanol plant in Treutlen County, Georgia.

The company says this first plant, combined with others to follow, is expected to produce over a billion gallons of ethanol per year.

Funded by Silicon Valley's Vinod Khosla, the plant is to turn wood waste from the state’s millions of acres of indigenous Georgia Pine into ethanol.

“Range Fuels can take what is traditionally considered a waste product, and turn it into a source of transportation fuel,” said Mitch Mandich, Range CEO.

The company has developed a new proprietary cellulosic process. Its system eliminates the use of enzymes, which have been an expensive component of traditional cellulosic ethanol production.

The process is not only suitable for wood chips, but for agricultural wastes, grasses, and cornstalks as well as hog manure, municipal garbage, sawdust and paper pulp, the company says.

The company's thermo-chemical conversion process, termed K2, uses two steps to convert biomass to a synthetic gas and from there, convert the gas to ethanol.

Range says the K2 system is also modular. Depending upon the quantity and availability of feedstock, the K2 system can scale from entry level systems to large configurations, it says. This range of system performance will allow the K2 to be placed near the biomass location reducing transportation costs, and will allow the most economical size system to be deployed.

Cellulosic ethanol has been criticized for its high price of production and inability to date to scale. Range investor Vinod Khosla recently told a Reuters Global Biofuels Summit that he could see cellulosic fuel prices sinking to $1 per gallon within 10 years.

Range Fuels, until recently, was known as Kergy.

Cleantech developments making news in the past 24 hours

• Econcern partners on €863M Chinese wind farm deal
• Behind the scenes at Cleantech Forum Shanghai
• Infinite Power raises $13M to ramp thin-film batteries
• Hawaii becomes next stop for Better Place
• Thar Technologies looks at India's karanj, jatropha for biodiesel

View the last week of cleantech developments here | Subscribe to full feed