Global Bioenergies Heads for Demo Scale: A Magic Path to Isobutane in Sight

by Jim Lane (Biofuels Digest) ... In France, Global Bioenergies announced that it has completed the financing of its demo plant, and is commencing construction immediately. The 5,000L demonstration-scale facility will be completed in spring 2015, and will be located at Leuna, near Leipzig in Germany, and will have a production capacity of up to 100 tons per year, enabling the delivery of samples to industrialists. This second pilot is the final step in Global Bioenergies’ development program before the full scale exploitation of the isobutene process.

Global Bioenergies is developing a direct process to convert renewable resources into hydrocarbons through fermentation. Since inception, the company focused its efforts on the production of isobutene — a four carbon, gaseous molecule that is currently derived via the C4 cut from steam cracking fossil petroleum. Isobutene can be converted into isooctane for fuels, butyl rubber for tires, organic glass, or PET for plastics.

Last month, the company announced the production of “second generation” isobutene, in a push to diversify accessible feedstock towards cheaper resources. Global Bioenergies had been using first generation feedstock, such as wheat-derived glucose, to set-up and optimize its bio-isobutene process. However, the process was designed to be versatile in terms of feedstock. With the right technical adaptations, it would indeed be well suited to the usage of non-edible resources – widely defined as “second generation” – such as wheat straw, corn stover, sugar cane bagasse or even wood chips.

This new pilot plant, to be supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research through a $7 million grant, would include a 3 year study at the Fraunhofer Center for Chemical-Biotechnological Processes.

This second facility represents a 10X jump in scale from the company’s first project, and will allow for a much purer isobutene product to be collected — required for certain downstream applications such as butyl rubber polymerization.

In June 2013, Global Bioenergies had announced the launch of its first industrial pilot in the heart of the Bazancourt-Pomacle biorefinery, close to Reims. This first pilot, to be run through a collaboration with Arkema and the CNRS, is supported by a EUR 5.2 million state financing through the French “Investissements d’Avenir” program. This first industrial pilot will set the bases for large scale exploitation of the isobutene process in its application to methacrylics. READ MORE