Advanced BioFuels USA

by Jim Lane (Biofuels Digest)  MetGen, Sweetwater Energy say “there’s gold in them thar side-streams”  —  For all of your questions about the advanced bioeconomy there’s just the one answer and that is “lignin”.  Why don’t we see more biobased chemical plants built these days? Lignin. Why do people shy away from hardwoods as a raw material even though it’s sustainable, available, reliable and affordable? Lignin. What raw material have more people tried to make money out of and failed than anything else? Lignin. If the bioeconomy really catches fire, it’ll be because of a breakthrough in what? Lignin.

The Yosemite Sam of materials

It’s the meanest, toughest hombre of a material that ever came out of the ground, it’s the Yosemite Sam of the advanced bioeconomy — unreliable, inconsistent, grumpy, fiery, strident, incapable of improvement, impossible to do anything with, and impossible to ignore. So people just burn it. It smells faintly like vanilla and almonds, but it ought to smell like $20 bills going up in smoke.

“Ya no good, bush-whackin’ lignin, ya valueless varmint!

But trapped deep inside lignin are some aromatic molecules that are easily worth $1500-$2000 per tonne — more than fuels, more than most bulk chemicals. More than some people I know. And you can find them in wood, which sells for far less than $100 per ton as a raw material. Yet, if you walk around the biomass industry, you’ll find pellet plant after pellet plant — chopping up wood to sell to Scandinavia as a source of affordable, renewable heat and power. Worth perhaps $80 per ton in heat value.

What’s the problem? The answer to all your questions is lignin.

But there’s been more work on lignin of late than ever before. 

…

Sweetwater Energy has finalized a licensing and joint technology development agreement with the Finnish company MetGen Oy for MetGen’s LIGNO technology platform which facilitates the enzymatic break down of Sweetwater’s ultra-clean lignin into its fundamental component parts.  This will allow the development of a full range of high value lignin-based products.

LIGNO’s secret? It’s MetGen’s enzyme set — in this case, bred for kraft pulp applications and thereby these alkaliphilic enzymes can effectively function at a pH up to 11, where lignin becomes fully soluble, with an added benefit of outstanding thermo-tolerance — think up to 80- degrees. READ MORE

3D printable resin: The Digest’s 2017 Multi-Slide Guide to melt-stable engineered lignin thermoplastic (Biofuels Digest)

Sweetwater Energy brings lignin-based activated carbon to market (Ethanol Producer Magazine)