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Alternative Energy - Friday, September 21, 2007

$100M In Funding For Coal>Methane's GreatPoint Energy

Coal is such a depressing Dickens' prop and the stories of the lost coal miners reminds us what an ugly business it is. But for now we are stuck with it and some are saying that 2008 could the the year of the lump of coal.

GreatPoint Energy out of Cambridge, MA has figured out a way to convert coal to clean methane which would win environmental brownie points for utilities. The company has just won $100M in funding led by Dow Chemical Co. and Citi Sustainable with AES Corp. and Suncor Energy also on-board. Existing backers are Advanced Technology Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Khosla Ventures and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers had put in $37M.

GreatPoint's secret sauce is a catalyst made of low-cost metals that can gasify coal, petroleum coke or biomass at a much lower temperature than today's standards. The result is a low-cost a process that's similar to what happens in the oil-and-gas industry. GreatPoints stands to provide a 40% cost reduction vs. current gasification standards which would give us natural gas from coal at under $4 per million British thermal units.

GreatPoint will use its financing to build a demo plant scheduled to come online 2009. It will look to raise another $50M and $75M in additional debt financing.

Joining GreatPoint in the coal rush are VC-backed CoalTek as well as Powerspan.

Read - CNN announcement