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]

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]

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]

In the latest AutoblogGreen podcast, we featured an interview with Coskata president and CEO Bill Roe. This is a transcription of that interview. For a way-too detailed look at the GM-Coskata cellulosic ethanol partnership discussed in this chat, check out this post.

ABG: I'm here with Bill Roe, CEO of Coskata, and we just listened to the presentations and had a little tour of the laboratories here on the site. I am a little bit interested in this partnership, that is kind of what we are learning about here today between your company and GM. We heard a little bit about what GM can do for you, some of the promotion, bringing it to other people and you said during lunch that other car did approach you and GM sort of was the best fit for you. Can you talk a little bit, now that the tape is rolling, about how that partnership came to be? And why you are excited to work with GM on this.

Roe: I think that the two companies, and for similar and yet dissimilar reasons, have an understanding of what is going to have to happen if there is going to really truly be a revolution in transportation fuels. General Motors clearly had undertaken a study to determine who is out there and what are the best bets, and who is going to be quickest to market in the next generation ethanol space. We did not know that. But concurrently we were looking at the enormity of what has to happen for the billions of gallons of ethanol that conceiveably can be produced to ultimately get to market because there is a tremendous amount of infrastructure change and infrastructure development that is going to have to take place. And so, when we began to look at, in our partnership model, who the players would be that we would necessarily want to talk to that had a long range, and I would emphasize that word "long-range", long view of what had to be done, obviously, the automotive firms came to mind. It just so happened that when we begun to work our way into General Motors to see who could we talk to about this, we found out that they were doing an independent study of their own of next generation ethanol companies, and so we fit right into that discussion. And, they went through the same diligence process with us that they did with – I think they said 14-16,18 other companies, and said; we like many attributes of many of those companies. But we see in Coskata something that is elegantly simply, fast to market and with economics that look like there is as good or better than anything will be in the perceivable future, and that is when they made their decision to partner. That is when we made, certainly, our decision to say "thank you" for supporting us because, again, these really is going to take lots and lots of collaboration and cooperation between major corporations, entrepreneurial start ups, technology companies, universities, and governments to make happen.

Read much more after the jump.

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.