Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator instructions) Your first question comes from Ron Oster – Broadpoint Capital.
Ron Oster – Broadpoint Capital
I was wondering if you could expand on your plans for your cellulosic facility, maybe and the potential costs of the demo plant and then any additional future plans with regards to a commercial scale facility down the road and also how you might fund this facility in 2009.
Neil Koehler
We’re very excited about our program with BioGasol and the Department of Energy. The project that we received a $24 million matching grant from the Department of Energy, so the total projected cost of this project is $48 million. We are in the process as I mentioned in the prepared remarks of putting the plan together and do expect to be in construction of that in 2009.
It is designed as a commercial demonstration that we can show as integrated into our existing corn ethanol platform as sharing much of the infrastructure and facilities. It is our plan to look at cellulose as a bolt on opportunity essentially to our existing fleet of corn ethanol plants as well as look down the road at new facilities that we would be building that would be dedicated exclusively to that technology.
It is also designed to scale up from there after we bring this online and projected in 2010 expect that we would scale it up from there to a 10X, to a roughly 30 million gallon side, either do that at Boardman or we could do it at one of our other facilities, that is yet to be determined.
In terms of the funding, that is a capital requirement that we will have to fund together with our partner, BioGasol. I will point out that in kind contributions do qualify under this and just as we have shown the ability to internalize a tremendous amount of the expertise in our current business model, there is a fair amount of that which we will build to provide in kind as opposed to going out and having to contract for the services.
But there’s no question that there will be additional capital required in 2009 and we are exploring different avenues for raising those funds and feel that right now there is a tremendous amount of interest on the part of the investment community in supporting this development and we are confident we will be able to raise the funds to keep that project on schedule.
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