You don’t often hear Kansas and Spain mentioned in the same sentence. Yet today Spanish company Abengoa is bringing another big cellulosic biofuel facility online in Hugoton, a small community in the Southwest corner of the state. This is the second big plant starting up this year, showing that after some predictable yet highly scrutinized delays, the cellulosic fuel industry is truly beginning to establish itself and making critical contributions to oil savings and climate goals.

It wasn’t long ago that cellulosic biofuels were the punchline of a joke: a phantom fuel that could not be economically produced in large volumes. Fast forward to today, and we see headlines like “Advanced Ethanol Makers Are Trying to Give Big