Company Name
Colusa (CLME.PK)

Company Web Site
http://www.colusabiomass.com/

Headquarters
Colusa, CA

Latest News
August 12, 2008
Stuttgart, Ark. -
Work is to begin later this month on an $80 million plant that is to convert rice products to ethanol. The plant is to employ about 200 people.

The plant will use rice hulls and rice straws to produce ethanol and commercial silica. Colusa Biomass Inc. CEO Tom Bowers said a smaller version of the plant will be built over the coming four months. The company will use the smaller plant to fine tune the production process, then build the full-scale plant, which is to be in production by late 2009.

Bowers, who addressed the Arkansas Plant Board on Wednesday, said the facility will extract silica/sodium oxide from rice straw. The compound is used in the electronics industry and to make solar panels.

"This is the first (rice-to-energy plant) worldwide. No one has ever done that before, and that's one of the problems in the financing," Bowers said.

Currently, farmers either burn their rice straw or plow it back into the ground.

The facility is to be built on a 40-acre site in Stuttgart's industrial park. The plant is designed to produce 12.5 million gallons of fuel ethanol and 152,000 tons of silica/sodium oxide annually, Bowers said.

State Agriculture Secretary Richard Bell, a former chief executive of Riceland Foods Inc. in Stuttgart, has been an advocate of turning the rice products into energy, particularly considering the rising price of corn that is used for ethanol. Also, high soybean prices have led soy diesel producers to blend tallow or lard to bring down the cost of raw materials.

Rice hulls and rice straw would not be under such price pressure, though some of the hulls are used by chicken producers.

Cellulosic ethanol produced from rice hulls would cost 43 cents per gallon in raw material, factoring the hulls at $40 per ton, Bell said earlier. A ton of rice hulls yields 92 gallons of ethanol, he said.

-----------------------------

Colusa is raising money to build its first bio-refinery in Colusa County. The facility will have an annual capacity to produce 12.5 million gallons of ethanol from approximately 140,000 tons of waste rice straw. The process is based on patented and proprietary technologies that convert waste biomass into ethanol for use in transportation fuels. The business model anticipates 11 such bio-refineries in the US.

Funding
No funding data.

Technology
Colusa Biomass Energy Corporation has a US patent that can use cellulose (woody portion of all plant life) to produce ethanol; the starting materials for our process are rice straw and rice hulls, and in the future corn stover and cobs, wheat straw and husks, wood chips from forest slashing, and sawdust from saw mills. How much ethanol can be produced from these cellulose-based raw materials? Using 2003 farm data from the US Department of Agriculture and taking into consideration the availability of these cellulose based materials, it has been conservatively estimated that over 1.0 trillion gallons of ethanol could be produced per year. This would reduce the importation of oil by an estimated 75%. Colusa Biomass Energy Corporation will initially build a 130,000 ton/yr rice straw plant near Colusa, CA. This plant will produce 12.5 million gallons of fuel ethanol, 16,800 tons of silica products, commercial carbon dioxide, and a high energy lignin fuel that will be used internally in the plant to reduce the cost of natural gas.