Global Bioenergies produces cellulosic isobutene at demo scale under the umbrella of the OPTISOCHEM project

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Type of post: NEWS.

Global Bioenergies has just announced that trials using wheat straw hydrolysate provided by Clariant (cellulosic sugars in tons scale coming from the Sunliquid® pre-commercial plant at Straubing) were successfully performed in its Leuna plant, leading to the production of cellulosic isobutene for the first time at demonstration scale.
Press release: “First production of isobutene from wheat straw at demo scale”, 06/02/2019.

Figure 1. Visual identity of the OPTISOCHEM project (taken from its website)

These runs were part of the OPTISOCHEM project:
Name
OPTimized conversion of residual wheat straw to bio-ISObutene for bio based CHEMicals
Call
H2020-BBI-JTI-2016, Innovation action – Demonstration.
Grant agreement ID: 744330
Start date
1 June 2017
End date
31 May 2021
Overall budget
16,376,816.83 €
EU contribution
9,755,493.63 €
Aim
To demonstrate the performance, reliability as well as environmental and socio-economic sustainability of the entire value chains for the transformation of excess wheat straw into bio-isobutene (bio-IBN) derivatives.
Partners and activities
- Clariant (Germany): Conversion of straw into glucose- and xylose-rich hydrolysates by Sunliquid® technology.
- Global Bioenergies (France and Germany): Fermentation of the straw hydrolysates into bio-isobutene.
- INEOS (Germany and France): Conversion of bio-isobutene into oligomers and polymers.
- TechnipFMC and IPSB (France): Preliminary engineering of an hydrolysate-to-isobutene plant and overall integration with a straw-to-hydrolysate plant.
- Energy Institute at the JKU Linz (Austria): Assessment of the sustainability and environmental benefits.

Global Bioenergies has successfully increased the performances of its micro-organism on traditional substrate such as sucrose and adapted its best microbial chassis to straw hydrolysates. On this basis, the French company successfully ran its pilot facility in Pomacle and its demo plant in Leuna both with straw hydrolysate and sucrose as a benchmark. It expects to produce several tons of bio-isobutene on this new non-conventional feedstock in the remaining periods of the project.

After the tests, INEOS received several batches of bio-isobutene from Global Bioenergies for qualification purpose and it found that the quality is promising. During the next phase of the project, INEOS is ready to evaluate conversion of additional quantities of bio-isobutene into downstream products in order to assess the potential of this bio-based feedstock as a building block for end consumer applications.

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