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. Bolsen said Coskata chose to partner with Westinghouse Plasma, a division of Canadian energy firm Alter NRG, because of its extensive experience with plasma gasification technology, which it acquired from NASA in the 1980s.

"We needed somebody ready to go and meet our timelines," he said.

Still the growth of ethanol as a fuel faces some huge hurdles. Producers need to be convinced that consumers will buy ethanol fuel, automotive manufacturers need to be convinced that consumers will buy vehicles that run on ethanol, and car buyers need to be convinced that they will be able to find ethanol pumps at their local gas stations.

Federal subsidies helped to create a surge in the construction of corn-based ethanol plants, but that very surge helped to drive up the wholesale price of corn, from $2 a bushel at the beginning of 2006 to record highs of more than $7.50 in the middle of 2008. As those prices rose, so did a stream of bankruptcies of ethanol production companies. Just last week, the unfinished $220 million Altra Nebraska ethanol plant in Carleton, Neb., was slated to be auctioned off in pieces.

Mr. Bolsen said Coskata's flexibility in feedstocks provides the company a margin of safety in the face of commodity price gyrations. Because their process does not rely on a single commodity, such as corn or soybeans, "that gives us a lot of confidence that even if prices go up, Coskata will still be able to make fuel to directly compete with gasoline."

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