The Loan Programs Office of the US Department of Energy (DOE) has chosen Abengoa’s subsidiary Abengoa Bioenergy to offer a conditional commitment for a loan guarantee worth $133.9 million for the building of an industrial-scale biorefinery plant.
The first-of-a-kind biorefinery plant will manufacture renewable liquid fuel using the abundantly available organic feedstock such as cellulosic biomass and plant fiber as sources. With issuance of a conditional commitment by the DOE, Abengoa Bioenergy has declared that it plans to begin construction of the biorefinery plant on a site located close to Hugoton, in Stephens County, Kansas.
The Chief Executive Officer at Abengoa, Manuel Sanchez stated that the company has been engineering this technology for a decade. In preparation for the Hugoton project construction, the company has engineered and fine tuned its proprietary technologies and manufactured cellulosic ethanol from the laboratory scale to a pilot biomass plant in York, Nebraska and eventually from a demonstration scale plant in Salamanca, Spain, he said.
Since 2003, the DOE has been encouraging Abengoa Bioenergy's development efforts for a new ethanol manufacturing technologies. The company received $34 million for its York pilot plant through DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy's Biomass Program. In 2007, Abengoa Bioenergy and DOE had signed a cooperative deal to offer up to $100 million for the development of the Hugoton biomass plant.
The President and Chief Executive Officer at Abengoa Bioenergy, Javier Salgado stated that after the successful demonstration of the commercial feasibility of its proprietary enzymatic hydrolysis technology in the Hugoton facility, the company will integrate the technology by incorporating cellulosic production into its current starch ethanol facilities. The Hugoton facility is also engineered to manufacture nearly 23 million gallons of superior cellulosic ethanol annually in addition to fulfilling the electrical energy needs of the facility.
Source: http://www.abengoa.com