Tomorrow and Friday, GM is hosting a biofuels seminar in Chicago. We'll be bringing you full coverage from the Windy City, but before we head over, we wanted to check up on what Coskata has been up to, considering that our friend Wes Bolsen will be on hand and we'll get an update directly from him. The company hasn't put out any press releases since April, but that doesn't mean nothing has happened.

Greentechmedia mentioned that the biofuel company should be just about finished with a third round of funding, which will probably be a big one. On top of a $25 million demonstration plant being built in Pennsylvania, Earth2Tech writes about a new $400 million Coskata plant in Florida in partnership with U.S. Sugar Corp. Whatever the general discussion is in Chicago, we'll make sure to get the official response from Coskata to these claims that there's simply no way they can make cellulosic ethanol for $1 a gallon. Stay tuned.

[Source: Greentechmedia]

General Motors and Coskata today announced that a pilot plant for cellulosic ethanol will be built in Madison, Pennsylvania. The plant will located adjacent to the Westinghouse Plasma Center in Madison. The plasma torches that Coskata will be using for their gasification process are based on technology that was developed by GM and Westinghouse in the early eighties. At that time the companies developed a plasma furnace used to melt raw materials for cast iron production at GM foundries. The first production application was at a GM foundry in Defiance OH in 1989.

Coskata is using the same plasma torch technology to heat biomass materials to over 1,600 degrees Fahrenheit. That temperature is sufficient to convert almost any organic matter into a gas that is an intermediate ingredient in Coskata's process for producing cellulosic ethanol. Coskata's pilot plant will use Westinghouse Marc-3 plasma torches while the commercial scale plant will use larger Marc-11 torches. The pilot plant will be in operation in Q1 2009 with the first commercial plant following in 2011.

[Source: General Motors]

When Coskata came out of stealth mode in January, the company announced that a 40,000 gallon-per-year commercial demonstration plant using a proprietary microbial cellulosic ethanol production process would be in operation by the end of 2008. Greentech Media reports that the biofuel start-up has begun construction on this demo plant, but we still don't know where. The location should be announced later this month, and the fuel from the plant will be used by GM at the Milford Testing Grounds and, possibly, by NASCAR. Coskata chief marketing officer Wes Bolsen also told Greentech Media that the tiny test lab at the company's Warrenville, Illinois location has helped double the efficiency of the ethanol-producing microorganisms since January. By late 2010-early 2011, a 100-million-gallon-per-year plant should be operational and a number of firms are bidding on the right to build it.

[Source: GreenTechMedia]

The magical cost of $1 per gallon of cellulosic ethanol is certainly a hot calling card these days, and one of the most well-known purveyors of this story is Coskata. Coskata splashed onto the scene in January with the big GM announcement, and has stayed in the news by announcing a partnership with ICM and, later this month, will disclose the location of its 40,000 gallons a year demonstration facility.

Bill Roe, the Coskata CEO, gave C-Net's Michael Kanellos an explanation yesterday of just how his company will be able to make this greener ethanol for that low a price. The short version is that Coskata's plan to license it's technology to bigger companies (companies that already know how to effectively build large ethanol plants), it's ability to use pretty much any carbon-containing item as a source for the fuel and it's mixed approach (one that contains both biological and thermochemical processes) to making ethanol all add up to a plan that, at this point, makes cheap cellulosic ethanol seem reasonable. Read the full details over on C-Net.

[Source: C-Net]

Photo by Jenn_Jenn. Licensed under Creative Commons license 2.0.

According to this tiny news posting, the cellulosic ethanol biotech team over at Coskata has raised $19.5 million in Series B funding (series B funds are made in the second round of investment in a private company). Whether that money includes the undisclosed amount GM put into the company earlier this year is unclear. I went hunting for the original regulatory filing where Private Equity HUB claims they found the information, but couldn't track it down. Coskata has not yet released an official statement about the funding, but PE says that backers named in the filing include Globespan Capital Partners, General Motors, Khosla Ventures, GreatPoint Ventures and Advanced Technology Ventures. The new name in the Coskata-backing lineup is Globespan.

[Source: Private Equity HUB]

When AutoblogGreen visited Coskata's Chicago headquarters, we didn't get into details about just how ordinary (in a 21st century American suburban business park kind of way) the surrounding area looked. Cars.com's description of their visit, though, starts off by questioning whether this potential energy leader's location is fitting for such important work:

... could [Coskata] really be found in a cluster of lookalike buildings housing an advertising agency, a medical clinic and a company called Yum Brands[?]

The answer is yes, and Cars.com goes on to describe why corn ethanol is a bad idea (actually, a "much, much worse idea" than we previously thought) and then describes a bit of Coskata's cellulosic ethanol production process. This should be a recap for those of you who read our initial report on what GM and Coskata are cooking up, but if you're hungry for more viewpoints on what Coskata is all about, it's worth a read.

[Source: Kicking Tires at Cars.com]

To get a little more information out of Coskata about this morning's announcement of a partnership with ICM to build the first commercial cellulosic ethanol plant using Coskata's proprietary process (past details on Coskata are here), we tracked down Wes Bolsen, chief marketing officer, business development at the company. Bolsen was an executive at ICM in his previous life, so he is very familiar with what ICM is all about (for now, this is building a lot of corn ethanol plants in the U.S.) and why the company is a good fit for Coskata.

Bolsen said that ICM, like the rest of the ethanol industry, knows that corn ethanol's days are numbered and that cellulosic biofuel is the way to go. After doing their homework, ICM decided that Coskata had the right process to move to commercialization with. Wes said that the relatively small footprint of a cellulosic ethanol plant - about 20 acres - will mean these plants have the potential to pop up all over the world, wherever there is some feedstock (like the municipal waste) and space. While the Coskata process can handle a lot of different kinds of input material, each plant would likely be built to handle only one type. Therefore, the design that is best suited for paper mill waste could be built next to a paper mill whereas a plant that works well with corn stork or corn fiber could be erected alongside a currently-operating corn ethanol plant.

Now for the unknowns: the location of this first plant has not yet been announced, nor what type of feedstock it will use. Exactly when it will be finished is also uncertain, but late 2010 or early 2011 is the target. The hope is to then have two more plants running by late 2011 or early 2012 and expanding from there to the point where Coskata is responsible for producing billions of gallons of cellulosic ethanol to the market every year. We'll keep watching.

You can listen to my chat with Wes here (5.3 MB, 11 min).

UPDATE: As Wes said in the comments below, he's taking issue with my characterization of what he said about the future of corn ethanol, the struck-out above. I didn't mean to give the wrong impression of what he said, so I'm going to explain why I wrote what I wrote. Wes said that ICM considers itself at the forefront of the ethanol industry, especially corn-based ethanol. But, when I asked about the move to cellulosic ethanol and away from corn, Wes said that, "At some point, everyone knows that that will stop." That's where my characterization came from. You can hear it at minute three of the audio clip. You can read Wes' clarification below.

While not as big a deal as Coskata's announcement at the Detroit Auto Show, the company is not letting the Chicago Auto Show go by without letting some more cellulosic ethanol news slip out. The company announced today that it had formed a strategic alliance with ICM for the design and construction of cellulosic ethanol plants. ICM is a background player in the ethanol field, and its patented proprietary process technology is responsible for about half of the ethanol made at plants in the U.S. We'll have to wait until late 2010 for the Coskata plant to become operational. You can read the press release after the jump.

Related:

• Mother Jones not too keen on Coskata/GM cellulosic ethanol development
• AutoblogGreen Q&A: Coskata CEO Bill Roe on cellulosic ethanol partnership with GM
• Detroit 2008: GM and Coskata announce worldwide cellulosic ethanol partnership

[Source: Coskata]

If all the AutoblogGreen coverage of the GM-Coskata cellulosic ethanol partnership wasn't enough to satisfy your curiosity about just how these two companies hope to make living green and going yellow that much better for the environment (at least until Coskata gets into the coal-to-ethanol stuff, which a lot of us have questions about), Green Fuels Forecast has a few videos for you. In the clip above, GFF talks with Coskata's Richard Tobey about the technical aspects of the syngas-to-ethanol process.

After the jump, you'll find video interviews with various GM and Coskata representatives (Coskata CEO Bill Roe and GM's Mary Beth Stanek and Candace Wheeler) as well as a DieselForecast interview with the CEO of BMW USA, Tom Purves. Purves talks about how BMW plans to introduce diesel engines to the U.S. market.

[Source: Green Fuels Forecast]

General Motors vehicles and biomass materials are two things that you can find pretty much anywhere on the planet. GM and Coskata Energy announced a partnership today at the Detroit Auto Show that certainly hints at a future where you we will find biomass materials fueling GM vehicles in a lot of places, maybe pretty much anywhere.

If you've heard the Coskata name before, it's likely from the name of the Coskata-Coatue Wildlife Refuge. The Coskata energy company, no relation, was started in July of 2006 with funding by ethanol-magnate Vinod Khosla's Khosla Ventures as well as Advanced Technology Ventures and Great Point Ventures. Why was all this big money interested in Coskata? Because Coskata claims they will soon reach one of the holy grails of the new energy movement: cheap cellulosic ethanol that can be created, well, pretty much anywhere in the world. The short version of this story: Coskata Ethanol can make ethanol from biomass, municipal solid waste and any other carbon-containing material and GM, which has taken an equity stake in Coskata, wants to promote the heck out of this ability.

More details than you can possibly devour in one sitting after the jump.