Mascoma’s Magic World for Magic Bugs
by Jim Lane (Biofuels Digest) …This is the Rome Labs site, which does quite a bit of intelligence-related R&D. The super-secret nature of cellulosic development is not entirely different – though hugh-hush cadres of generals and admirals are supplanted by hush-hush cadres of investors, strategic partners and dudes from the Department of Energy.
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It’s a scaling exercise. You start at the bench with a beaker, and generally go up in increments of 5X – sometimes, 10X if you are feeling risky, sometimes more. But it takes a lot of steps to build out to 7,500 gallon fermenters that are king of the hill in a small demonstration plant. Not only do you have to scale up in terms of building out the fermenters, you have to test out the microbes’ performance at each step along them way.
…In a demonstration of cellulosic ethanol there are a couple of basic modules. You have a feedstock delivery area. Turns out that contract woodchips and sawdust comes with rocks, critters, and “other” attached. So you have to clean. Then, you pre-treat to soften the material and make it easier for the enzymes to liberate the sugars from the cellulose. Then, you perform the hydrolysis, which is freeing those complex C5 and C6 sugars from the wood biomass. Then the fermentation, where the sugars are converted into alcohols in a process not entirely unlike making beer. Then, the resulting alcoholic swill is distilled into pure ethanol.
…You see, fast rate, low capex – you need a smaller plant and less steel for a rated capacity. High yield, low opex – you need less biomass, and less feedstock acquisition, storage and handling, per gallon of fuel.
…For now, the team is working in campaigns, each run designed to test and optimize new equipment, new process, and new brothers and sisters of the microbes as they are developed and optimized at the company’s New Hampshire labs. READ MORE
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