Biorizon raises 10 M€ for the development of bio-aromatics
Type of post: NEWS IN BRIEF.
The province of Noord-Brabant, TNO, ECN
and VITO are jointly investing 10 M€ in the
development of bio-aromatics. Biorizon
plans to use these funds to finance various projects designed to enable the
commercial production of bio-aromatics for industry in 2025. The four parties
made this announcement in Antwerp during Biorizon's annual event.
Figure 1. Signing the agreement by: Peter Wolfs
(Director Sustainable Chemical Industry at TNO), Bruno Reyntjens (Commercial
Director at VITO), Jaap Kiel (Program Development Manager Biomass at ECN) and
Bert Pauli (Vice governor of the Province of North Brabant).
Shared Research Center Biorizon, an initiative
of TNO, VITO, ECN and Green Chemistry Campus, is developing technologies for
extracting aromatics from vegetal residual and other streams. In this way,
Biorizon is keen to offer an alternative to extracting raw materials from
petroleum that is both profitable and sustainable. Potentially this offers
scope for replacing 40% of all chemicals.
The province of Noord-Brabant is investing 5 M€
up to 2020 and TNO, ECN and VITO are investing another 5 M€ in total. This
investment is intended to act as a flywheel to connect companies and other
stakeholders over many years to one or more of the Biorizon research lines:
- Thermochemical conversion of biomass into
aromatics (led by ECN).
- From sugars to aromatics (led by TNO).
- From lignin to aromatics (led by VITO).
The complete information can be found here: press
release, 27/11/2017.