First pro­duc­tion of isob­utene from wheat straw at demo scale

Evry (France), 06 Feb­ru­ary 2019 — Glob­al Bioen­er­gies (mem­ber of IBB net­work) today announces that runs using wheat straw hydro­lys­ate provided by its part­ner Clari­ant were suc­cess­fully per­formed in its Leuna demo plant, lead­ing to the pro­duc­tion of cel­lu­losic isob­utene for the first time at this scale. These runs were part of OPTISO­CHEM, a pro­ject which star­ted in June 2017 and was gran­ted €9.8 mil­lion by the Bio Based Industry- Joint Under­tak­ing (BBI-JU) as part of the H2020 pro­gram. The aim of the pro­ject is to demon­strate a new value chain com­bin­ing Glob­al Bioen­er­gies bio-Isob­utene pro­cess with tech­no­lo­gies developed by Clari­ant and INEOS, two of Europe’s lead­ing chem­ic­al com­pan­ies: cur­rently under­u­til­ized resid­ual wheat straw has been con­ver­ted at demo scale into second gen­er­a­tion renew­able bioisob­utene, and will even­tu­ally be trans­formed into oli­gomers and poly­mers usable in lub­ric­ants, rub­bers, cos­met­ics, solvents, plastics, or fuels applic­a­tions. The intense R&D cooper­a­tion will con­tin­ue until May 2021. OPTISO­CHEM focuses on the demon­stra­tion of a new value chain, based on the com­bin­a­tion of the tech­no­lo­gies and know-how of the par­ti­cipants from four EU mem­ber states: 

• Con­ver­sion of straw into gluc­ose- and xyl­ose-rich hydro­lys­ates by Clari­ant sun­li­quid® tech­no­logy (Ger­many)
• Fer­ment­a­tion of the straw hydro­lys­ates into bio-isob­utene by Glob­al Bioen­er­gies (France and Germany)
• Con­ver­sion of bio-isob­utene into oli­gomers and poly­mers by INEOS (Ger­many and France)
• Pre­lim­in­ary engin­eer­ing of an hydro­lys­ate-to-isob­utene plant and over­all integ­ra­tion with a straw-to-hydro­lys­ate plant, by Tech­nip­FMC and IPSB (France)
• Assess­ment of the sus­tain­ab­il­ity and envir­on­ment­al bene­fits by the Energy Insti­tute at the JKU Linz (Aus­tria)

The BBI-JU, a pub­lic-private part­ner­ship between the European Uni­on and the Bio-Indus­tries Con­sor­ti­um (BIC), is ded­ic­ated to real­iz­ing the European bio-eco­nomy poten­tial, turn­ing bio­lo­gic­al residues and wastes into green­er every­day products through innov­at­ive tech­no­lo­gies and bio-refiner­ies expec­ted to become the heart of the bio-eco­nomy. The BBI-JU selec­ted this pro­ject under the name OPTISO­CHEM (N°744330), in the frame of the European HORI­ZON 2020 pro­gramme for research and innov­a­tion, fol­low­ing a very select­ive and com­pet­it­ive pro­cess led by inde­pend­ent experts. Markus Rar­bach, Head of Bio­fuels & Deriv­at­ives of Clari­ant (mem­ber of IBB net­work) com­ments: ​“OPTISO­CHEM is demon­strat­ing a key value chain with­in the bio-eco­nomy: advanced bio-refiner­ies based on agri­cul­tur­al residues. From our pre-com­mer­cial plant in Straub­ing (Ger­many) we have sup­plied cel­lu­losic sug­ars in tons scale to Glob­al Bioen­er­gies’ facil­it­ies for con­ver­sion to bio-isob­utene dur­ing the first peri­od of the pro­ject. We are very pleased with the excel­lent res­ults from all part­ners and will con­tin­ue to provide addi­tion­al quant­it­ies in the next phases so as to pre­pare for even­tu­al com­mer­cial pro­duc­tion in the future.” Fre­der­ic Pâques, COO of Glob­al Bioen­er­gies declares: ​“Dur­ing this first peri­od, we suc­cess­fully increased the per­form­ances of our micro-organ­ism on tra­di­tion­al sub­strate such as sucrose and adap­ted our best micro­bi­al chassis to straw hydro­lys­ates. We suc­cess­fully run our pilot facil­ity in Pomacle (France) and our Demo facil­ity in Leuna (Ger­many) both with straw hydro­lys­ate and sucrose as a bench­mark. We expect to pro­duce sev­er­al tons of bio-isob­utene on this new non­con­ven­tion­al feed­stock in the remain­ing peri­ods of the pro­ject” Jean-François Boideau, EMEA Com­mer­cial Gen­er­al Man­ager at INEOS Oli­gomers, said: ​“Our sites have over fifty years of exper­i­ence in the pro­duc­tion of oli­gomers and poly­mers of isob­utene which are used in lub­ric­ants, rub­bers, cos­met­ics, plastics, solvents, and fuels. To date, we received sev­er­al batches of bio-isob­utene from Glob­al Bioen­er­gies for qual­i­fic­a­tion pur­pose, and the qual­ity is prom­ising. Dur­ing the next phase of the pro­ject, INEOS is ready to eval­u­ate con­ver­sion of addi­tion­al quant­it­ies of bio-isob­utene into down­stream products in order to assess the poten­tial of this bio-based feed­stock as a build­ing block for end con­sumer applic­a­tions.” Source: Press release, Optioso­chem, 2019-02-06