The world’s first cellulosic ethanol production facility — owned and operated by Iogen in Ottawa, Canada — has been converting wheat straw into ethanol since 2004. Abengoa Bioenergy is completing construction of a commercial-scale cellulosic ethanol facility, located in Salamanca, Spain, that will by the end of 2007 begin producing 1.2 million gallons of cellulosic ethanol from wheat straw each year.
Companies across the United States are right now beginning construction of modern biorefineries to produce biofuels from cellulose. Within the next few years, ethanol made from a variety of cellulose feedstocks collected in different parts of the United States – from corn stover and wheat straw in the Midwest, to sawdust and wood chips in New York, to sugar cane and bagasse in Louisiana – will enter the marketplace.
These first few plants will help find ways to make ethanol from cellulose more efficiently and cheaply, allowing the industry to continue to expand and to meet the growing consumer demand for cleaner alternative fuels. In the meantime, biotech-based improvements in producing ethanol from corn can help to meet the current rapid growth in demand for biofuel. Through advances in industrial biotechnology, ethanol yields per bushel of corn have increased 20 percent since 2000, rising from 2.5 gallons per bushel to nearly 3.0 gallons per bushel today.
On a worldwide scale, a 2007 analysis by McKinsey & Co. shows that there is enough available cellulose feedstock to replace 50 percent of transportation fuels – 360 billion gallons – by the middle of this century without impacting availability of food (http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/). Meeting just 10 percent of world transportation fuel demand would replace the annual oil production for fuel of Saudi Arabia.