{"id":20481,"date":"2014-05-21T03:06:55","date_gmt":"2014-05-21T01:06:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.biofuelsdigest.com\/bdigest\/2014\/05\/18\/fermentable-cellulosic-sugars-for-capex-of-6-5-cents-per-gallon-freakishly-low-cost-venture-still-at-early-stage\/"},"modified":"2014-05-20T11:12:51","modified_gmt":"2014-05-20T09:12:51","slug":"fermentable-cellulosic-sugars-capex-6-5-cents-per-gallon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/fermentable-cellulosic-sugars-capex-6-5-cents-per-gallon\/","title":{"rendered":"Fermentable cellulosic sugars for capex of 6.5 cents per gallon?"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s a capex figure so low that it sounds like a decimal point is missing. <\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Though early-stage and just developing data out of its pilot \u2014 it\u2019s well worth seeing what\u00a0Sustainable Ethanol Technologies is up to, in its aim to drive down the capital costs of extracting cellulosic sugars from biomass.<\/span><\/p>\n

Among the many technologies that work on the front end of cellulosic biofuels \u2014 that is, extracting fermentable sugars from a targeted non-food biomass, we hadn\u2019t ever heard of a system that cost $65K per million gallons in capex, and 60 cents per gallon (excluding the cost of biomass) in the opex, until we ran into Sustainable Ethanol Technologies \u2014 very early-stage and just now emerging out of stealth-mode in North Carolina.<\/p>\n

Systems usually run into the millions, even at small-scale, for the front end saccharification \u2014 that biomass just doesn\u2019t want to give up its sugars, it\u2019s worse than prizing a winning lottery ticket out of someone\u2019s hand. So, it\u2019s costly.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur advantage is low cost,\u201d says CEO Julie Goodliffe, whose startup out of UNC Charlotte received the first strategic corporate partnership award from the Charlotte Venture Challenge for their patent-pending process to produce cellulosic ethanol from any kind of biomass.<\/p>\n

\u201cNature has solved the problem of breakdown, our fungi grow through the biomass, and the fungi can degrade the lignin and then get to the sugars.\u201d<\/p>\n

How does it work? \u201cWe allow our fungi to grow on biomass, then breakdown the living system in a pile of woodchips or stover. We allow them to do it for 45 days, then mechanically grind. No acids or enzymes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Why so low-cost? \u201cWe don\u2019t need a stainless steel tank, a concrete slab will do,\u201d Goodliffe added. \u201d We don\u2019t need lots of water, nor do we have hazardous chemicals in the process.\u201d<\/p>\n

How does this compete or pair up with existing technologies that extract sugars? \u201cThe cellulosic ethanol industry and others like Sweetwater are reducing costs but still need improvement. Their process is complimentary, they can use our fungi, our biomass, and it doesn\u2019t doesn\u2019t interfere downstream.<\/p>\n

Where is the company in terms of scale-up? \u201cThe research has been done at lab scale,\u201d Goodliffe told the Digest, \u201cand we\u2019ve shown that our fungi will grow on different types of biomass; we\u2019ve studied sugars in woodchips, pine, corn stover. We have been getting enough to ferment the sugars. And, we haven\u2019t been using autoclaves or other systems that wouldn\u2019t be used in the field. We\u2019ve used barrels, very dirty, with biomass from MSW at the EcoComplex and tipped yard waste. We innoculated it with fungi, left it, then grind it via a hammer mill, and tipped into a fermentation tank, then distilled it and got ethanol.<\/p>\n

The yields? \u201cWe can convert 14% of woody biomass into sugars,\u201d Goodliffe said. So, that translates into something like 40 gallons per ton, which is low. \u201cwe\u2019ll need more time and funding to optimize the process, and validate at scale.\u201d<\/p>\n

The business model? Goodliffe explained: \u201cThe model is licensing the technology; we\u2019ll need third parties to test, such as an ethanol producer or lab.\u201d<\/p>\n

Why 45 days? \u201cAt this stage, its optimal in terms of maximizing sugars and having very little loss, if any, of the biomass itself,\u201d the CEO continued, \u201cThe fungi are going to eat a little bit, so we use whiterot fungi to eat through lignin, that\u2019s 30 days. Then we use then the brown rot for 15 days to get through to the sugars. We stop there because otherwise they will eat the sugar.\u201d<\/p>\n

Are there economies of scale in that $65K cost per million gallons process? \u201cThey are there, but we\u2019re going to need engineering resources to study that.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Digest\u2019s Bottom Line<\/h3>\n

An ingenious concept, very early-stage. Complimentary to other processes that use harsher, faster measures at larger scale. But well suited to the concept of extracting the sugars locally, right on the farm \u2014 think about transporting 280 pounds of sugars instead of a ton of biomass, from either on-farm operations, or local sugar extraction locations.<\/p>\n

How much can the process be optimized, what mixes of sugars (e.g. C5<\/sub>, C6<\/sub>) can be obtained, hoe are adverse weather conditions tolerated, how much water in the biomass can be tolerated \u2014 these are questions that need to be answered. But any system that can produce sugars with these kind of upfront costs \u2014 6.5 cents per gallon \u2014 is going to attract attention and investigation.<\/p>\n

One is of the pilot plant (one 500-gallon fermentation tank, one 600-gallon distillation tank, one condensation tank attached to the distillation tank, and the hammermill in the foreground), and one is of wood chips with our fungi growing on them (white on the wood chips).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s a capex figure so low that it sounds like a decimal point is missing.
\nThough early-stage…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","nova_meta_subtitle":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5572],"tags":[],"supplier":[7128,7129],"class_list":["post-20481","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bio-based","supplier-sustainable-ethanol-technologies","supplier-unc-charlotte"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20481","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20481"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20481\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20481"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20481"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20481"},{"taxonomy":"supplier","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/supplier?post=20481"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}