Nov. 3--Ethanol has been touted as a solution to America's "oil addiction" and lambasted as a threat to the survival of the world's poor because some say corn used to produce ethanol would be better used to feed people than to fuel cars.

An Illinois company that has completed construction of a plant in Westmoreland County sidesteps that issue by using nonfood feedstocks, ranging from wood chips to rubber tires, to create ethanol.

Warrenville, Ill.-based Coskata partnered with Westinghouse Plasma Corp. and General Motors to build the plant, which is in a Westinghouse facility in Madison.

The plant can produce 40,000 to 50,000 gallons of ethanol a year, but future larger scale versions based on it could produce up to 100 million gallons of ethanol a year. The automotive giant is using the plant's output to test its "flex-fuel" vehicles, which run on a blend of ethanol and gasoline.

Coskata's process is part mechanical and part biological. The mechanical part consists of shoving feedstock into a tank where it is vaporized by extremely high temperatures, leaving only a gas. The biological part is the specially bred bacteria that consume the gas and excrete ethanol.

"As long as it has carbon in it, we can gasify it," said Hector L. Cruz, engineering vice president.

That includes municipal waste, said chief marketing officer Wes Bolsen. "Biomass is local, waste is local," he said. "There is no reason to build pipelines. Let's get it to where the consumers are, not make it in the Midwest, build a pipeline and ship it to the East Coast."

The company is in discussions for siting its first commercial facility but hasn't named a location.

Coskata calls the anerobic bacteria that eat the gas "proprietary microorganisms," meaning that they have a patent on the supertiny life form, which it licensed from the Oklahoma Biofuels Consortium. That positions the company to make money, not simply by building more biofuel plants, but also by licensing their process to others.

That will be a major part of its business model going forward, said President and CEO Bill Roe.

"We consider ourselves to be a technology company, not an operating company," he said. "We'll be licensing a lot more facilities than we'll be building."

Coskata had hoped to have the plant running six months ago, but Mr. Roe said the company underestimated the time needed for the civil engineering and electrification of the plant -- "We needed more power than anticipated."

Mr.