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