Coskata, Inc. was a

Warrenville, Illinois Warrenville is a near west suburb in DuPage County, Illinois, United States. At the 2010 census, the city had a total population of 13,140, which was estimated to have increased to 13,174 by July 2019. It is a part of the Chicago metropolitan ...

based energy company incorporated in 2006 by

serial entrepreneur Entrepreneurship is the creation or extraction of economic value. With this definition, entrepreneurship is viewed as change, generally entailing risk beyond what is normally encountered in starting a business, which may include other values th ...

Andrew Perlman's GreatPoint Ventures group. The company was developing processes for the production of

cellulosic ethanol Cellulosic ethanol is ethanol (ethyl alcohol) produced from cellulose (the stringy fiber of a plant) rather than from the plant's seeds or fruit. It can be produced from grasses, wood, algae, or other plants. It is generally discussed for use as a ...

from woodchips. Coskata's process combines both biological (i.e.,

microbes A microorganism, or microbe,, ''mikros'', "small") and ''organism'' from the el, ὀργανισμός, ''organismós'', "organism"). It is usually written as a single word but is sometimes hyphenated (''micro-organism''), especially in olde ...

) and thermochemical (

heat In thermodynamics, heat is defined as the form of energy crossing the boundary of a thermodynamic system by virtue of a temperature difference across the boundary. A thermodynamic system does not ''contain'' heat. Nevertheless, the term is al ...

and

chemicals A chemical substance is a form of matter having constant chemical composition and characteristic properties. Some references add that chemical substance cannot be separated into its constituent elements by physical separation methods, i.e., wit ...

) processing. The estimated cost of production via this technology was reported as under $1 per gallon, as opposed to corn-based ethanol costing approximately $1.40 per gallon Coskata announced in April 2008 that the company would begin producing ethanol on a small scale at a plant being built near Pittsburgh, PA. With a capacity of about annually, the fuel will be used by General Motors to be tested in their vehicles. The pilot plant is being constructed in a modular design by Zeton Inc. in

Burlington, Ontario Burlington is a city in the Regional Municipality of Halton at the northwestern end of Lake Ontario in Ontario, Canada. Along with Milton to the north, it forms the western end of the Greater Toronto Area and is also part of the Hamilton met ...

Canada Canada is a country in North America. Its ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, covering over , making it the world's second-largest country by tot ...

. A full-scale production plant capable of producing 50 to of cellulosic ethanol was expected to go online in 2011. In October 2011, an article on the Coskata website stated that a "semi-commercial" pilot plant in

Madison Madison may refer to: People * Madison (name), a given name and a surname * James Madison (1751–1836), fourth president of the United States Place names * Madison, Wisconsin, the state capital of Wisconsin and the largest city known by this ...

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, had been running successfully for 2 years. In 2008, Coskata signed a deal with

US Sugar Corporation U.S. Sugar Corporation is a privately owned agricultural business based in Clewiston, Florida. The company farms over 230,000 acres of land in the counties of Hendry, Glades, Martin, and Palm Beach. It is the largest producer of sugarcane ...

to build a cane-waste biofuels conversion facility in Florida. Competitors include Fulcrum BioEnergy and LanzaTech. As of March 2013, the company's web site stated "While our technology platform is capable of producing multiple fuels and chemicals from a diverse array of feedstocks, we are initially focused on commercializing our natural gas conversion process." The company went out of business in 2015, and the technology formerly belonging to Coskata has re-merged as the new company Synata Bio."Coskata’s technology re-emerges as Synata Bio" in ''BiofuelsDigest'', January 24, 2016
Retrieved March 22, 2016.

References

External links

Official Webpage
- No longer active.
Partnership with General Motors
{{Authority control Alcohol fuel producers Defunct technology companies of the United States Companies based in DuPage County, Illinois Warrenville, Illinois Defunct energy companies of the United States