2.2 mil­lion euros paid to Glob­al Bioen­er­gies after the first term of the OPTISO­CHEM European project

Glob­al Bioen­er­gies (mem­ber of IBB net­work) has suc­cess­fully con­ver­ted sug­ars from wheat straw into bio-isob­utene at demo plant scale: Clari­ant, a part­ner on the sup­ply side of the con­sor­ti­um, has used its Sun­li­quid® tech­no­logy to pro­duce sug­ar-rich hydro­lys­ates from wheat straw, which were then con­ver­ted into isob­utene in Glob­al Bioen­er­gies’ demo plant loc­ated in Leuna, Ger­many. This isob­utene is then itself ded­ic­ated to be con­ver­ted by chem­istry spe­cial­ist INEOS, also a mem­ber of the OPTISO­CHEM pro­ject, into poly­mers and oli­gomers that can be used in any num­ber of high-per­form­ance applic­a­tions, par­tic­u­larly in cos­met­ics. On the 26^th of Feb­ru­ary, mem­bers of the OPTISO­CHEM pro­ject presen­ted activ­it­ies from the first term of the pro­ject to inde­pend­ent experts appoin­ted by the BBI-JU. Fur­ther to the intern­al val­id­a­tion pro­ced­ure set up by the BBI-JU, the con­sor­ti­um has just received the sum of €3.3 mil­lion, of which €2.2 mil­lion for Glob­al Bioen­er­gies. Bern­ard Chaud, Head of Indus­tri­al Strategy at Glob­al Bioen­er­gies, said: ​“Con­cur­rently with our work on tra­di­tion­al sug­ar sources (sucrose or gluc­ose from sug­ar beet, sug­ar cane or starch), we have suc­cess­fully adap­ted our bio-sourced isob­utene pro­duc­tion pro­cess to the use of so-called ​“advanced” sources of sug­ar both eco­nom­ic­ally attract­ive and present­ing a pos­it­ive envir­on­ment­al pro­file. In this OPTISO­CHEM pro­ject, for instance, the sug­ar comes from straw. In two oth­er pro­jects (REWO­FUEL and SWEET­WOODS) we are adapt­ing our micro-organ­isms to sug­ars from soft and hard woods. These advanced sug­ars are mostly com­posed of gluc­ose but they also con­tain vari­able pro­por­tions of sec­ond­ary sug­ars (xyl­ose, man­nose and ara­bin­ose in par­tic­u­lar) along with impur­it­ies that are known to inhib­it the fer­ment­a­tion pro­cess. Adapt­a­tion work con­sists in ​“teach­ing” our isob­utene-pro­du­cing micro-organ­isms to con­vert all sug­ars whilst deal­ing with impur­it­ies.” Marc Del­court, CEO of Glob­al Bioen­er­gies, con­cluded: ​“Deriv­at­ives of isob­utene are play­ing an increas­ingly sig­ni­fic­ant role in the field of cos­met­ics, which is improv­ing its index of nat­ur­al­ness year after year. Bio-isob­utene will help the cos­met­ics industry to fur­ther increase the nat­ur­al­ness of its products by provid­ing access to bio-sourced products fea­tur­ing key func­tion­al­it­ies. Addi­tion­ally, isob­utene deriv­at­ives have the poten­tial to play a major role in the trans­ition towards more envir­on­ment­ally friendly road and air travel.” Source: Glob­al Bioen­er­gies, press release, 09.04.2019