U.S. Department of Energy Secretary Samuel W. Bodman today announced that DOE will invest up to $114 million over four years for four small-scale biorefinery projects to be located in Commerce City, Colorado; St. Joseph, Missouri; Boardman, Oregon; and Wisconsin Rapids, Wisconsin.

“These project proposals were innovative and represent the geographic diversity that we strive for when making the widespread use of clean, renewable fuels commercially viable,” Secretary Bodman said. “Spurred by the President’s ambitious plan to reduce projected U.S. gas consumption by twenty percent by 2017, our goal is to aggressively push these technologies forward to get them out into the marketplace as quickly as possible, so they can have a real impact. Advanced biofuels offer tremendous promise for helping our nation to bring about a new, cleaner, more secure and affordable energy future.”

Building on President Bush’s goal of making cellulosic ethanol cost-competitive by 2012, these commercial-scale biorefineries will use a wide variety of feedstocks and test novel conversion technologies to provide data necessary to bring online full-size, commercial-scale biorefineries.

The companies receiving the grants are ICM Incorporated of Colwich, Kansas; Lignol Innovations Inc., of Berwyn, Pennsylvania; and Pacific Ethanol Inc., of Sacramento, California.