Mascoma Corp., which plans a $250 million plant to make cellulosic ethanol in the Upper Peninsula, announced Thursday it has made "major research advances" that will allow it to mass-produce the alternative fuel at lower costs.Mascoma said it has discovered the key to consolidated bioprocessing, a much-touted strategy for producing cellulosic ethanol in a high-yield, single-step process through the use of engineered microorganisms.
The method eliminates the need to produce cellulase enzymes, significantly reducing cost.
"These advances enable the reduction in operating and capital costs required for cost-effective commercial production of ethanol, bringing Mascoma substantially closer to commercialization," Jim Flatt, the company's executive vice president of research, development and operations, said in a statement.
"Our results go a long way toward establishing the feasibility of the processing concept that we have built our company around, so this is a big day for us."
Mascoma in July 2007 announced plans to build what would be the nation's first plant to make ethanol from non-food sources in Kinross, near Sault Ste. Marie. The facility would have an annual capacity of 40 million gallons using wood chips from local timber operations and other sources.
The company is aiming to break ground on the project later this year or early in 2010.
Mascoma in February announced it had begun producing cellulosic ethanol at a test plant in upstate New York.
The company presented its proof-of-concept plan for consolidated bioprocessing, or CBP, at a recent biofuels symposium in San Francisco.
"This is a true breakthrough that takes us much, much closer to billions of gallons of low-cost cellulosic biofuels," said Bruce Dale, the editor of the journal Biofuels, Bioproducts and Biorefineries and a Michigan State University professor. "Many had thought that CBP was years or even decades away, but the future just arrived."
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