By the time the next Chem Show comes around in two years time, the advanced bio-refinery will have moved off the drawing board and become a reality. That’s the prediction of leading bio-refining specialist Greg Bohlmann, of California-based consultancy SRI Consulting (Booth 703).
Bohlmann says that an advanced bio-refinery is one that will make use of as many parts of a plant or agricultural residue as possible to make both chemicals and fuels. He gives examples of raw materials as corn stover, sugarcane bagasse and wheat straw.
No less than six projects have been earmarked by the U.S. Dept. of Energy (DOE) for up to $385 million in grants that will supplement private financing and help to prove the concepts (see Table). It is very likely that most of them will be online by late 2009.
Bohlmann also sees progress happening on an international scale. In addition to the DOE projects, he cites Brazilian investment to produce ethanol and biodegradable polymers from sugarcane bagasse (so-called green polymers). Work in France, meanwhile, includes efforts to make succinic acid from ligno-cellulosic materials like wood waste or grasses, for subsequent conversion into biodegradable polymers.
Other notable steps forward have come from lactic acid producer, Purac, which is developing bio-refinery concepts using corn stover and sugar cane. Lactic acid is the fundamental building block used to produce PLA, an important commercial renewable polymer.
From his engineer’s perspective, Bohlmann sees the advanced bio-refinery as an exciting challenge. While the concepts of have been proven on a laboratory scale, essential processes such as fermentation and chemical recovery from fermentation broths have yet to be scaled up to the levels needed commercially. This has made obtaining capital for bio-refineries difficult to date, but the six DOE projects will likely prove the concepts and lead to an acceleration in bio-refinery development.
Casting an eye on the future, Bohlmann sees several important trends:
- Competition between the uses of crops for food and their use for chemical/fuels production will tend to drive the industry towards ligno-cellulosic materials like switch grasses and wood waste. However, competition over land use will continue well into the future;
- Metabolic Pathway Engineering will become a much more familiar phrase to chemical engineers. It describes the bio-chemical engineering of organisms and plants to do a required job in a manufacturing system. This might amount to “designing” a plant to give a better chemical or fuel yield, or “improving” a bacterium to boost performance of a fermentation process;
- Ultimately, it may make the most sense to produce polymers rather than biofuels as the main product of bio-refineries. It will all depend on the agricultural feedstock cost and the comparative cost of petro-based alternatives.