French firm partners with Tech to create biofuel
Biomethodes is an Evry-based firm specializing in industrial biotechnology, especially enzymes that are critical in major industrial processes.
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Percival Zhang, an assistant biological systems engineering professor in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, invented the new process, which frees up fermentable sugars from non-food biomass for conversion into ethanol.
Ethanol is currently derived from corn kernels.
"But that's food. If we want to produce 30 to 60 billion gallons of ethanol, which is what is needed to meet the President's goal, we have to use the entire plant, or the stover and leave the kernels as food," Zhang said.
Zhang's process uses that corn stover, similar to straw, the leaves and stalks left in a field after harvest that makes up about half of the yield of a crop. The residue left in the field after harvest of any cereal grain is the most abundant agricultural residue in the U.S.
The largest challenge for conversion from raw materials to ethanol is high processing costs, resulting in higher prices for ethanol than for gasoline.
The cellulose that makes up the bulk of the stover's cell structure is broken down into fermentable sugars by a pretreatment process Zhang developed.
Technologies are already available to convert cellulose to sugars, but the costs are still high and sugar yields are low.
"We have the technical ability, but making ethanol production economical is the problem," Zhang said.
Zhang uses a multi-step, low-pressure, low temperature chemical process to break cellulose down into sugars while not damaging them. Zhang then uses another system to concentrate dissolved cellulose, extract sugars, and enable chemical recycling.
"Co-products can generate more income, making biorefinery more profitable, and enable satellite biorefineries that fully utilize scattered lignocellulose resources," Zhang said.
After processing, byproducts can be utilized in glue, polymers, carbon fiber and even sweeteners, according to Zhang's paper on the subject.
While ethanol is in high demand in the U.S., due to a longstanding and well-established ethanol production infrastructure and existing first-generation ethanol technologies, the European Union is more interested in hydrogen generation for fuel cell technologies.
"We have a process with the potential to economically produce ethanol from biomass on the scale of billions of gallons per year," John Talerico, a VTIP licensing associate, said.
Zhang and colleagues from Oak Ridge National Lab and the University of Georgia found that an artificial enzyme cocktail will completely convert starch and cellulose into hydrogen and carbon dioxide when and where that form of energy is needed.
Fuel cells can use that hydrogen to create electricity. Water byproduct can then be recycled to a starch reactor, creating a clean process. Laboratory tests also confirm that it all takes place at low temperature – about 86 degrees – and at normal atmospheric pressure.
Biomethodes plans to set up a pilot plant in Virginia to focus on ethanol production and its byproducts using Zhang's biomass-to-ethanol process.
"The pilot plant will integrate two major technologies – Virginia Tech's pretreatment process (which breaks down the biomass) and Biomethodes' hydrolysis enzyme optimization technology to improve the cellulose degradation into fermentable sugars," Biométhodes CEO Gilles Amsallem said.
Biomethodes will develop the biomass-to-hydrogen process in France and will utilize it in a hydrogen fuel cell prototype and small, scale model car.
"All the conditions for the success of the hydrogen project exist in Europe and Biométhodes technologies are the most appropriate to develop this process," Amsallem said.
The company then plans to enter into licensed production with fuel-cell companies for prototypes that can be tested with - and ultimately incorporated into - commercial fuel cell designs for portable applications.
"Our technologies and Biomethodes' expertise in enzyme optimization should create best conditions for success of commercial development of biohydrogen and second generation biofuels in Europe and the U.S.," Talerico said.
Zhang, who has been at Tech since August 2005, began his research at Dartmouth Thayer School of Engineering, where he received his Ph.D., was a postdoctoral research associate, and then a research scientist.
