Biorizon raises 10 M€ for the development of bio-aromatics

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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.

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