…BRISK (Biofuels Research Infrastructure for Sharing Knowledge) is rooted in the recognition that engineering new production processes for fossil fuel alternatives is among the most promising technological fixes for reducing carbon emissions. A European network of 26 leading universities, hosted by KTH, the BRISK programme is designed to cross-fertilise experimentation in thermochemical biomass conversion by funding the movement of researchers among at least 60 test facilities and pilot plants stretching from Turkey and Greece in the south to Scandinavia and the UK in the north.

Established last autumn, BRISK began accepting proposals for trans-European research projects in April.

…BRISK aims to give researchers the tools to answer fundamental questions about every step in conversion of biomass to fuels: preparing the feedstock, reaction processes such as pyrolysis or gasification, treatment of the resulting products, and catalytic processing.  READ MORE

…What is it with Louisiana? It seems like at-scale renewable diesel projects have never found a a better home. There’s the Dynamic Fuels project – 75 million gallons in Geismar; the 137 million gallon Diamond Green Diesel project under construction in Norco, as a JV between Valero and Darling, and now this one, clocking in at 85 million gallons.

If and when all three are completed, that’s 297 million gallons of capacity in the one state.  …All three plants find themselves in the heavy shipping corridor between Baton Rouge and New Orleans.  READ MORE and MORE (Emerald Biofuels) and MORE (Advanced Biofuels USA)

Food and beverage wastewaters have high biological oxygen demand (BOD) from dissolved sugars, fiber, and carbohydrates and cannot be discharged into a sanitary sewer without significant surcharges. ThermoEnergy can help eliminate the expense of BOD treatment and disposal by making concentrated sugars suitable for resale in a wide variety of applications, including feedstocks for bio-ethanol production. In addition to concentrating the sugars, the remaining water is purified to levels suitable for normal discharge.

“Instead of incurring profit-draining treatment and disposal costs, companies are studying converting those wastewater streams into revenue streams, and ThermoEnergy is ready to help,” said ThermoEnergy CEO Cary N. Bullock.

“One particularly exciting use for the recovered sugar is for feedstock for bioethanol production,” Bullock noted. “Bioethanol is garnering significant international attention and support. Cleaning up a water discharge stream and converting it to a usable bio-feedstock has a tremendous, positive impact on sustainability.”

ThermoEnergy’s system is compact in size, uses less energy than competing technology, produces higher-quality concentrations, and is very low maintenance.

In 2011, Congress eliminated corn subsidies for ethanol production. The Obama Administration, however, continues to support renewable fuel standards that call for the production of more than 15 billion gallons of renewable fuels in 2012. In addition, the U.S. Department of Defense has a goal of meeting 25% of its energy requirements from renewables by 2025. Waste sugar is expected by ThermoEnergy to become a high-value feedstock replacement for corn in conventional ethanol production.

ThermoEnergy Sugar Recovery Systems integrate best available technologies to achieve the lowest OPEX/CAPEX, and the highest concentration levels of recovered sugar. These include reverse osmosis, ThermoEnergy TurboCAST®, and ThermoEnergy CAST® systems. ThermoEnergy’s Controlled Atmospheric Separation Technology (CAST®) concentrates sugar-bearing wastewater to create up to a 65-brix sugar product for use in a variety of agricultural and renewable fuel market applications. At the same time, the system recovers 100% of the wastewater for reuse in plant operations. ThermoEnergy’s TurboCAST® systems combine controlled atmospheric separation with state-of-the-art blowers to provide maximum efficiency, flow rates in excess of 60,000 GPD, and integration with commercial water technologies for zero liquid discharge applications in the food and beverage industry.

ThermoEnergy offers several financing options for system deployment, including sale of capital equipment, leasing, and “design/build/own operate” with fixed monthly payments. Service and extended warranties are also available.  READ MORE

All biodiesel processes, whether traditional or nontraditional, involve a settling process as the penultimate step. During the settling process, the biodiesel and glycerin mixture is settled using a decanter or a centrifuge to separate the biodiesel from the glycerin. The separated biodiesel is then taken through the final steps, which, in some cases, involve two stages: washing/polishing and distillation. Washing/polishing is mandatory and biodiesel distillation is optional. This article discusses both the washing/polishing and distillation stages.

Washing and polishing mean the same thing. The term washing is used if water is used to do the washing step, and the term polishing/filtration is used if powder, ion exchange resins or some other media is used instead. This step is necessary to wash or polish off the excess glycerin or soap in the freshly separated biodiesel to meet the ASTM specification.

Biodiesel distillation is an optional step. As the name indicates, the distillation process distills the fuel to a colorless methyl ester. Both of these steps are individually addressed below in detail.  READ MORE and MORE (Biodiesel Magazine) and MORE (Biodiesel Magazine) and MORE (Biodiesel Magazine/Pacific Biodiesel Technologies)

Is there a new path to biofuels hiding in a handful of dirt? Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) biologist Steve Singer leads a group that wants to find out. They’re exploring whether a common soil bacterium can be engineered to produce liquid transportation fuels much more efficiently than the ways in which advanced biofuels are made today.

The scientists are working with a bacterium called Ralstonia eutropha. It naturally uses hydrogen as an energy source to convert CO₂ into various organic compounds.

The group hopes to capitalize on the bacteria’s capabilities and tweak it to produce advanced biofuels that are drop-in replacements for diesel and jet fuel. The process would be powered only by hydrogen and electricity from renewable sources such as solar or wind.

The goal is a biofuel—or electrofuel, as this new approach is called—that doesn’t require photosynthesis.

…The scientists chose to work with R. eutropha because the bacterium is well understood and it’s already used industrially to make bioplastics.

…In the first approach, Logos Technologies is developing a two-liter bioelectrochemical reactor, which is a conventional fermentation vessel fitted with electrodes. The vessel starts with a mixture of bacteria, CO₂, and water. Electricity splits the water into oxygen and hydrogen. The bacteria then use energy from the hydrogen to wrest carbon from CO₂ and convert it to hydrocarbons, which migrate to the water’s surface. The scientists hope to skim the first batch of biofuel from the bioreactor in about one year.    READ MORE includes animation

TMO’s proprietary technology platform can break down a wide range of waste biomass into cellulosic ethanol, while reducing costs through savings in maintenance, production time and capital expenditures, including reduced enzyme loadings. Utilizing cassava stalk, TMO’s conversion process will yield 70 to 80 gallons of 2G ethanol per ton of feedstock.

“The total global capacity for 2G biofuels should reach more than 4 billion gallons by 2015,” said Pavel Molchanov, energy analyst at Raymond James. “Crucial to even greater production of cellulosic ethanol is the availability of diverse feedstock options, and cassava stalk can play an important role in the Asian market.”

The flexibility and cost benefits of TMO’s technology attracted Chinese partners to develop the first industrial-scale (30,000+ tons) cellulosic ethanol plants in China using cassava. At the demonstration plant, TMO will finalize process design using optimized energy and mass balances for cassava stalk at scale. The company will apply information derived from operating the demonstration facility to develop plans and process engineering designs to advance TMO’s solution to full commercial scale.

“With more and more countries seeking affordable fuels, abundant cassava stalk will play a vital role in expanding cellulosic biofuels production,” said TMO acting CEO Robert Parker. “TMO’s technology is primed to meet growing market demand by economically converting waste cassava stalk to bioethanol at commercial scale.”  READ MORE

• Conversion efficiency of sweet sorghum sugars were similar to sugarcane.

Energy crop company Ceres, Inc. (Nasdaq: CERE) today announced its improved sweet sorghum hybrids were successfully processed into renewable diesel by Amyris, Inc. …

The pilot-scale project evaluated both sugars and biomass from Ceres’ sweet sorghum hybrids grown in Alabama, Florida, Hawaii, Louisiana and Tennessee. To process the sugars that accumulate in the plants, known as free or soluble sugars, the sorghum juice was first extracted from the stems and concentrated into sugar syrup by Ceres. The syrup was then processed by Amyris at its California pilot facility using its proprietary yeast fermentation system that converts plant sugars into its trademarked product, Biofene, a renewable hydrocarbon commonly known as farnesene, which can be readily processed into renewable fuels and chemicals.

The inedible plant fibers of the sweet sorghum, known as cellulosic biomass or bagasse, provided an additional source of what are called cellulosic sugars. The DOE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), at its Colorado pilot-scale biochemical conversion facility, converted the biomass from Ceres’ hybrids into cellulosic sugars, which Amyris subsequently fermented into renewable farnesene. The joint evaluation project was funded in part by a U.S. Department of Energy Integrated Biorefinery grant awarded to Amyris. The grant included a sub-contract award to Ceres.

“We believe that sweet sorghum could be an important and complementary source of fermentable sugars as the U.S. expands the production of renewable biofuels and biochemicals through the use of non-food crops outside of prime cropland,” said Spencer Swayze, Ceres director of business development. He noted that the free sugars in sweet sorghum are readily accessible, and with new technology as demonstrated by NREL, larger quantities of low-cost sugars could be made available. “As an energy crop, sweet sorghum is an impressive producer of low-cost, fermentable sugars. A second stream of sugars from the biomass would be highly compelling,” Swayze said.

“The results from these evaluations confirmed that the Amyris No Compromise renewable diesel production process performs well across different sugar sources. Ceres’ sweet sorghum hybrids produced sugars that yielded comparable levels of farnesene as sugarcane and other sugar sources Amyris has utilized,” said Todd Pray, Amyris director of product management. “Sweet sorghum can provide timely feedstock flexibility with environmental benefits. We look forward to utilizing Ceres’ sweet sorghum in our commercial-scale production facilities,” Pray concluded.

As a dedicated energy crop, sweet sorghum has a number of advantages. It is fast-growing and can efficiently produce both large amounts of fermentable sugars and biomass. The plants require substantially less fertilizer than sugarcane, and can be grown in drier areas since they utilize water more efficiently.

Ceres first commercialized its improved hybrids in Brazil this season. This spring, Ceres also introduced its first two hybrids to supply larger-scale evaluations in the United States. Ceres anticipates Florida and the Gulf Coast as well as California’s Imperial Valley, Arizona and Hawaii could be markets for sweet sorghum production.  READ MORE

George Stanko, President of CORE BioFuel, states: “We are very excited about working with Technip to provide the next step in our commercialization process, which is to complete the engineering for our first plant. Technip, as a leader in syngas plant design, is uniquely positioned to support CORE through the critical engineering phase of commercialization. One of the critical factors in our selection of the Technip team is their established working relationship with key component suppliers such as Air Products and Chemicals and Energy Products of Idaho (now Outotec). Both firms have agreements with CORE for development of production equipment.”

Technip is a world leader in project management, engineering and construction for the energy industry. From the deepest Subsea oil and gas developments to the largest and most complex Offshore and Onshore infrastructures, their 30,000 people are constantly offering the best solutions and most innovative technologies to meet the world’s energy challenges. Present in 48 countries, Technip has state-of-the-art industrial assets on all continents and operates a fleet of specialized vessels for pipeline installation and subsea construction. READ MORE

…Renmatix employs a patented, two-step, supercritical fluid hydrolysis technology platform—trademarked the Plantrose process—that can efficiently extract and solubilize C5 (hemicellulose) and C6 (cellulose) sugars from a variety of lignocellulosic biomass such as wood or agricultural residues when subjected to water at high temperature and pressure, all the while separating out the lignin.

…London, Ontario-based Comet Biorefining Inc. utilizes a unique biomass pretreatment process and enzymes to isolate and extract sugar, primarily monomeric glucose, and its lignin constituents.

…Essentially, each sugar product has to be customized to meet strict feedstock specifications. Virent employs a patented catalytic BioForming process technology at its 10,000 gallon per year demonstration facility in Madison, which converts soluble sugars from various biomass stocks into a range of advanced drop-in biofuels such as biogasoline and light and heavy diesel fractions, plus chemicals.

…If enough ready-to-use sugar feedstock volumes enter the market to meet high demand, its developers understand that a distributed, modular approach is the most practical avenue to achieve economies of scale.

… “We see not only supplying the technology to produce sugars, but also the modules to produce them because when you talk about small, distributed plants, they need to be very low in capital cost,” (Comet CEO and founder Andrew) Richard says.

…The company( Proterro) is optimizing a patent-pending biosynthetic process that combines an engineered photosynthetic microorganism, a cyanobacteria, with an advanced high-density, modular solid-phase bioreactor to produce its trademarked sucrose end product, called Protose.   READ MORE

{SHIFT} Turning wood waste into bio-fuel helps industry find a cost-effective and environmentally sustainable energy source to complement traditional fuel

A new public-private partnership is set to drive revenue for the forest products industry in Northern Ontario. Montreal-based pulp and paper company Domtar is partnering with Battelle, an independent research and development specialist in Columbus, Ohio, to test a new technology that rapidly converts wood waste into crude bio-oil and gas.

The newly formed provincial Centre for Research and Innovation in the Bio-Economy (CRIBE) is playing its part by providing up to $6-million in funding for the project. The chosen test site is Domtar’s mill operations in Dryden, Ontario.

Known as fast pyrolysis, the technology applies heat without the use of oxygen to convert the biomass – in this case rejected wood chips.

…“This has been specifically developed for small scale, distributed implementation. We’re not trying to mirror the petroleum industry here. Rather, we are looking at the economic advantages of collocating smaller systems with nearby biomass sources. Because it is small, it can easily be deployed in combination with other activities, so you don’t have to drag materials great distances for processing.”  READ MORE