B.C. firm gets U.S. funds for ethanol plant
Gordon Hamilton
Vancouver Sun
Thursday, January 31, 2008
A Vancouver bioenergy company has been awarded up to $30 million by the U.S. Department of Energy to build a small-scale biorefinery in Colorado.
The grant to Lignol Innovations Inc., the U.S. subsidiary of Vancouver-based Lignol Energy Corp., is part of a $114-million funding commitment by the U.S. to four different companies. Each is to build refineries that can commercially produce ethanol from cellulose, part of a U.S. government commitment to produce 30 billion gallons of ethanol a year from a variety of sources by 2020.
The Department of Energy said the government grants will cover about a third of the cost of the projects.
"This is a major, major injection of cash into new technologies," said Lignol CEO Ross MacLachlan of the award.
Lignol is to build a plant in Colorado, which MacLachlan said will have a total cost of $88 million.
The plant is to be operated by Suncor Energy, which operates a refinery in Commerce City, Colo. Suncor is to buy all of the ethanol produced.
A condition of the U.S. funding is that the plant must be completed by 2012. Once completed, it is expected to produce 2.8 million gallons of cellulosic ethanol a year, MacLachlan said.
Cellulosic ethanol is essentially alcohol distilled from the natural sugars in trees. It takes far less energy to produce ethanol from wood than from corn, but it is more costly.
Lignol has a pilot plant that uses a pulp digester to cook wood chips to remove the lignin, the binder in wood that holds the fibres together.
The pulp is broken down by enzymes into sugars which are then fermented and distilled. MacLachlan said the enzymes are what makes the process expensive, but Lignol's process uses fewer enzymes and extracts other chemicals from the wood that have added value, making the process more feasible.
© The Vancouver Sun 2008
Posted by Arthur Caldicott on 31 Jan 2008