An Ontario company says it’s $4 million in public funding closer to building a demonstration-scale facility to “efficiently” make cellulosic ethanol from agricultural and wood wastes.
Mississauga-based Woodland Biofuels said Friday it will get a $4 million investment from the province’s Innovation Demonstration Fund (IDF) to build its “groundbreaking” demonstration plant.
The company said it expects to build its facility at the Bioindustrial Innovation Centre in the University of Western Ontario’s Sarnia-Lambton Research Park.
The demo plant “will confirm our ability to successfully produce ethanol from renewable waste with breakthrough efficiency,” Woodland CEO Greg Nuttall said in a release Friday.
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“We expect to be, by a significant margin, the lowest-cost producer of automotive fuel in North America.”
Woodland, on its website, lists its facilities’ potential feedstocks as including crop and wood biomass as well as biosolids such as animal and human wastes.
Governments have banned ope- field and pit burning and beehive burners and placed restrictions on hog-fuel burners, the company said on its site. Also, it said, “alternative forms of disposal such as burying or cogeneration are inefficient and environmentally damaging.”
The company said its IDF funding was confirmed in an announcement Friday by provincial Consumer Affairs Minister Sophia Aggelonitis at a plant owned by one of Woodland’s partners, Zeton Inc.
Zeton is a Burlington-based engineering and construction firm specializing in pilot-scale factories.
The IDF, first announced in Ontario’s 2009 budget, is a $50 million, four-year program to spur partnerships between the province’s research and innovation ministry and “innovative companies” to develop “emerging technologies.”
The fund is specifically geared toward “environmental, alternative energy, bio-products, hydrogen and other globally significant technologies.”
The program covers up to 50 per cent of eligible costs for approved projects with commercialization as their end goal, with funding ranging from $100,000 to a maximum $4 million per project.
The program can offer backing in the form of secured forgivable loans, repayable loans, incentive term loans, royalty agreements or equity participation.
