Cellulosic Ethanol Gets a $100 Million Boost

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http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/39858/?p1=A1

Despite years of federal mandates, the cellulosic biofuels industry—which aims to make ethanol from wood chips and similar plant matter instead of corn—has yet to start commercial-scale production.

But the fledgling industry got some good news yesterday when Virdia, a company that converts cellulose into sugar, announced that it had raised over $100 million in private and public financing to go toward building its first commercial-scale plant. Converting cellulose to sugar is the most difficult part of making cellulosic biofuels. Once the sugars are produced, they can be converted to ethanol using the conventional process for making ethanol, which uses corn sugar.

Wood chips and other cellulosic materials have several advantages: they're abundant, they don't compete with food crops like corn, and they result in far lower carbon-dioxide emissions than corn ethanol.

Philippe Lavielle, Virdia's CEO, says the company's technology, when employed at a large scale, could make cellulosic sugars economically competitive with sugar made from corn. "A corn ethanol plant could use sugars from Virdia instead of corn sugar," he says.