POET Outlines Lessons from 4-Year Long Startup of Project Liberty Cellulosic Ethanol Project

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July 22, 2019

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(Green Car Congress) Commercially viable cellulosic ethanol plants has proven devilishly difficult to bring to fruition. The primary outlier from the list of efforts that have shut down over the past few years is POET/DSM’s Project Liberty (earlier post). In an editorial in the journal Biofuels, Bioproducts and Biorefining, two POET team members set out some of the lessons they learned during the four-year startup period.

Biomass collection. POET/DSM has shown that large-scale commercial corn stover collection is possible and that farmers are willing to participate. …

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Interdependence of unit operations. Among the bigger challenges for Project LIBERTY startup, the authors said, were the scale of the operation and the integration of multiple units of operation. …

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New operation areas. The larger challenges of starting up the plant were associated with new areas of operation such as netwrap (the material used to bale corn stover) removal. …

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Pretreatment was another challenge, with the biggest lesson being that stover does not behave like a wood chips.

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Saccharification and Fermentation. Saccharification and fermentation were not a major source of problems during the startup process, although the team gleaned some valuable lessons there as well. READ MORE

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