Glob­al Bioen­er­gies: First mile­stone hit in Bio­MA+ project

The pro­ject aims at devel­op­ing a renew­able value chain to methac­ryl­ic acid, a key con­stitu­ent of acryl­ic paints. Achiev­ing this first mile­stone res­ult unlocks a €1.7m pay­ment. Glob­al Bioen­er­gies devel­ops since 2008 a pro­cess to con­vert renew­able resources into isob­utene, a core pet­ro­chem­ic­al from which fuels, plastics and rub­bers are derived. The com­pany announced in 2013 that the French State had gran­ted a €5.2m ​“Inves­t­isse­ments d’Avenir” fin­an­cing to a con­sor­ti­um com­posed of Arkema, the CNRS and Glob­al Bioen­er­gies. The object­ive was to put togeth­er and demon­strate at pilot scale a com­plete pro­cess that would first con­vert renew­able resources (sug­ar, cer­eals and agri­cul­tur­al and forestry waste) into isob­utene, which would in turn be con­ver­ted into methac­ryl­ic acid, a key con­stitu­ent of acryl­ic paints. Glob­al Bioen­er­gies was gran­ted €4m for this pro­ject and had announced in 2014 hav­ing received an ini­tial pay­ment of €600K. Glob­al Bioen­er­gies had in this con­text star­ted-up an indus­tri­al pilot in Novem­ber 2014 on the agro-indus­tri­al site of Pomacle-Bazan­court. The com­pany ARD, a sub­si­di­ary of the sug­ar refiner CRISTAL UNI­ON, is in charge of the pilot’s exploit­a­tion and now car­ries out on a weekly basis fer­ment­a­tion tri­als mim­ick­ing exploit­a­tion at full-scale. Tony Gen­ov­esi, Glob­al Bioen­er­gies’ man­ager of the Bio­MA+ pro­gram declares: ​“The pro­cess adapts well to its new indus­tri­al envir­on­ment, des­pite it being rad­ic­ally dif­fer­ent to the labor­at­ory envir­on­ment in which it has pre­vi­ously been developed. We have pro­duced more isob­utene in the last three months than we had over the past five years!” The French Envir­on­ment and Energy Man­age­ment Agency (ADEME), who oper­ates the ​“Inves­t­isse­ments d’Avenir” pro­gram for the State, has val­id­ated the first mile­stone of the Bio­MA+ pro­ject. As a res­ult, Glob­al Bioen­er­gies will soon receive a 1.7 mil­lion euro pay­ment com­prised for one third of a sub­sidy and for two thirds of a reim­burs­able advance. Marc Del­court, CEO of Glob­al Bioen­er­gies con­cludes: ​“The steady pro­gress in scal­ing-up our isob­utene pro­cess takes place while the oil industry is facing a major crisis. This crisis is linked to the massive but very tem­por­ary exploit­a­tion of Amer­ic­an shale oil. How­ever, it does not affect Glob­al Bioen­er­gies’ fun­da­ment­als in the short or medi­um term because the oil market’s equi­lib­ri­um will most cer­tainly be back before com­mer­cial exploit­a­tion of the isob­utene pro­cess begins in 2017 – 2018. Moreover, our isob­utene pro­cess would be com­pet­it­ive from $50 per bar­rel crude oil in spe­cif­ic mar­kets, with demand that rep­res­ents sev­er­al com­mer­cial-scale plants”. Source: Glob­al Bioen­er­gies S.A.