Green Biologics inks Iowa demo plant deal with Easy Energy Systems

The plant and expansion

The current breakthrough announced by Green Biologics takes the company well down the route to scale — at the 40,000 liter mark, aiming for 80,000. By contrast, Cobalt has been reporting that it has passed the 100,000 liter scale in producing down at the LS9 facility in Okeechobee, Florida. But this work by Green Biologics is really turning the chase for n-butanol into a horse race.

Ultimately, companies that are successful, financially, will need to reach much later fermentation scale — anything between 500,000 liters and the million gallon scale that Gevo is now successfully operating at. So, there’s a step up of 12X-30X required here — and overall, a reference plant for Green Biologics, featuring multiple fermentation units, would involve a 50-100X scale-up from this level.

Green Biologics pilot plant in Gahenna, Ohio

So, more steps to come — but it’s an interesting combination with Easy Energy. As Green Biologics CEO Sean Sutcliffe noted, he Easy Energy deal provides Green Biologics with significant demonstration capability at a fraction of the cost of a green field demonstration plant.

“We plan to make significant investments in feedstock preparation, processing and product storage as well as process control” said Sutcliffe, “but more importantly, we plan to scale our proprietary (patent pending) advanced fermentation process at demonstration scale. In addition the facility will have the capability to allow us to scale and demonstrate the use of cellulosic biomass as a sugar source for renewable butanol production.”

The Easy Energy plant

For those familiar with the old Renewable Fuel business on the south side of Emmetsburg (a few klicks from POET-DSM’s Project Liberty, the 25 million gallon cellulosic plant now under construction) this is the same building, substantially enhanced with Easy Energy’s investments.

At the time EES was founded, they were focused on developing an ethanol production process that worked at small-scale. The company’s  Modular Energy Production System self-contained, fully automated, ethanol biofuel refinery that is pre-fabricated and tested in a factory and can be shipped anywhere worldwide in container-sized modules that can be field installed much like plug-and-run LEGO® bricks. The MEPS comes in 1M Gallons per Year, 2MGPY and 5MGPY configurations. More their technology here.

In today’s Digest, we look at scale-up in China to date, and plans for a first commercial project in the US – plus the bottom line, by following the page links below.