Before this unlikely partnership was formed, Coskata was a small and relatively obscure biotech company founded in 2006, working to improve clostridia strains from the University of Oklahoma to more efficiently ferment ethanol from synthesis gas. GM’s partnership with Coskata, which was announced at the 2008 North American International Auto Show in January, has brought this unknown company into the public spotlight.
GM could have partnered with any second-generation ethanol technology conversion company it wanted to, says Wes Bolsen, Coskata’s chief marketing officer and vice president of business development. Bolsen joined Coskata in early 2007, only weeks before the company began talks with GM. He came from ICM, where he worked as chief financial officer.
ICM has subsequently become Coskata’s partner in process design and commercialization.
Bolsen says he approached GM after a foreign automaker expressed serious interest in Coskata’s second-generation ethanol technology. “I reached out to my contacts at GM with this in mind and asked, ‘Would you be interested in talking with us?’” Bolsen explains. “Well, it turned out to be an eight-month venture. We waited until the final days before the auto show to work out the details of the many millions of dollars [GM was] putting in.” He couldn’t disclose the final amount but says GM chose Coskata after looking at the best available conversion technologies in the world. “[GM] saw that our plans aren’t based on inventions that are needed or something we can do in the future,” Bolsten says. “It’s now. It’s like, ‘Oh. All you need to do is build a plant? Holy cow.’”
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Coskata states it can produce cellulosic ethanol for “under a buck a gallon.” It has 16 patents issued or in development, and states its design can achieve more than 100 gallons of ethanol per dry ton of input material. Since moving its microorganism from the University of Oklahoma labs to Coskata’s, company scientists have increased the strain’s ethanol productivity rate by 50-fold. Argonne National Laboratory gave Coskata’s ethanol a 7.7-to-1 net energy balance compared with corn-based ethanol’s 1.3-to-1 ratio.
“What we have is a process that uses no enzymes and no catalyst," Bolson says. "It's biological, and we can use any input material. Others use gasification on the front end, but they use a chemical catalyst they had to buy to produce mixed alcohols. Then you have to sell all those various products, or you have to recycle them back through.” These processes require the synthesis gas to be highly pressurized before making it through the catalyst, but Bolsen says the Coskata process uses low temperatures and pressures. “We recover all the energy from between 1,600 degrees Fahrenheit syngas down to 100 degrees, like in a steam generator.”
GM has a zero-landfill waste policy, and its tool-and-die plant in Flint, Mich., became GM’s 10th landfill-free facility in late 2007. It will recycle 180,000 pounds of polystyrene per year, the equivalent of 42 million disposable coffee cups. Also, vehicles retained by the company at their end of life are 84 percent recyclable, and the Coskata process could turn that 16 percent nonrecyclable material into ethanol. “The coolest phrase I heard was, ‘The car eats itself,’” Bolsen says.
A 40,000-gallon-per-year demonstration plant will be complete in late 2008. Afterward, the plan is to begin quickly building commercial plants. Coskata will build its own plants and license its technology to other companies.
By 2012, half of GM’s new vehicle fleet will be flexible-fuel vehicles (FFV), doing its part in solving the tiresome chicken-and-egg analogy so often given to the FFV and E85 availability dilemma. “It really opens up the dynamic and says ethanol is no longer a blending fuel,” Bolsen says. “It’s a primary fuel in the United States. You have the biggest automaker in the world stepping up and saying, ‘You know what, it’s not a chicken and egg problem anymore. We’ll pick chicken.’”
