Brighter brights and more sustainable whites

Broadening the sources and uses for cellulosic ethanol.

As we reported yesterday in the Digest, DuPont and Procter & Gamble, announced a collaboration to use cellulosic ethanol in North American Tide laundry detergent, a first of its kind.  Tide Cold Water will be the first brand in the world to blend cellulosic ethanol in a scalable and commercial way.

DuPont will produce at the (just about completed) Nevada, Iowa biorefinery, which has a planned capacity of 30 million gallons per year.

Tide Cold Water “powered by nature” will re-purpose over 7000 tons of agricultural waste a year. This will be equivalent to the power needed to do all the washing in homes across California for over a month. The company is making its products better, so it is easier for everyone to make a small change every day to care for the environment. (That equates to around 500,000 gallons of cellulosic ethanol per year).

It’s another sign that sources and uses are proliferating in the cellulosic ethanol space. Let’s look at some of the implications.

The background

Ethanol has long been a key ingredient in the Tide formulation, allowing for stability of the detergent formula and better washing performance. The substitution of the current corn based ethanol with cellulosic is the latest innovation in the companies’ 30-year partnership, making it easier for consumers to make sustainable choices in their everyday lives.

For some time, what is known as “industrial biotechnology” in the US has been known as “white biotechnology” in the EU — this may the first example of “whiter whites biotechnology”.

It’s also one of the few announced cases of cellulosic ethanol purposed for industrial rather than the fuel markets. In the advanced bioeconomy, only GlycosBio has, to date, talked up the opportunities in that market. Generally at this level, impurities are limited to the 20-25 ppm level (in food grade, the heavy metals have to be eliminated, if present, and an even more stringent impurities requirement is in place for beverage or “FCC” (food chemical codex) designation.

The rationale

According to P&G research, “consumers, now more than ever, are focusing on how their personal behavior and the goods they buy impact the environment.” But “while about 70% of shoppers want to be sustainable, they can’t or won’t make tradeoffs on performance.”

Other upgrade markets

The other major upgrade market has been renewable jet fuel, specifically alcohol to jet, which we have described as “conceptually powerful.”
If you dehydrate ethanol (that is, remove the water, H2O), what you have is ethylene, a hydrocarbon. And you are the road to a longer-chain range of molecules such as kerosene — and there are existing chemistries to make that transformation.

Byogy has been developing one of these — a four-step process of dehydration, oligomerization, and hydrogenation that has picked up some heavyweight airline interest.

Another technology has emerged in recent months. A catalytic process developed originally at Oak Ridge, that also dehydrates ethanol — but instead of producing pure ethylene, it converts ethanol in one step to a range of diesel and jet molecules, with only about 3% ethylene content in that step. That’s Vertimass. More on that here.

Broadening sources as well as uses

Most of the attention this year is rightly focused on the greenfield cellulosic ethanol plants being built by the Big Five: DuPont, POET-DSM, GranBio, Abengoa and Beta Renewables/Biochemtex. With a number of technologies at demonstration scale, such as Clariant and Inbicon — and even more at pilot scale.

But the bolt-on technologies are getting more and more interesting.

Last Month, Syngenta announced the name for its cellulosic ethanol process technology: Cellerate. Enhanced by Enogen corn enzyme technology, Cellerate is a collaboration between Syngenta and Cellulosic Ethanol Technologies (a subsidiary of Quad County Corn Processors).

The first production was recorded in July, after the commissioning of the farmer-owned ethanol plant’s Adding Cellulosic Ethanol (ACE) project, a new “bolt-on” process that adds the capability to convert the kernel’s corn fiber into cellulosic ethanol, in addition to traditional corn starch ethanol.

Also, consider Edeniq’s Cellunator technology, which enables ethanol plants to mill corn and other plant materials into a well-mixed slurry of small, uniformly-sized feedstock that can be more easily converted into sugars needed to produce biofuels and other biomaterials. Edeniq owns and operates a pilot plant in Visalia, California where the company’s patented technologies are currently being used to convert cellulosic feedstocks, such as corn stover, to cellulosic sugars and ethanol.

But there’s more afoot in the outright conversion sector than the Edeniq/Logos project. Up in Washington state, we reported earlier this month that  Advanced Biofuels Corp. has bought a 7 million gallon per year first generation ethanol plant and plans to re-fit it into an advanced biofuel facility using Bio-Process Innovation Inc technology. The refitted plant will produce 6 million gallon per year cellulosic ethanol plant from wheat straw including producing 1 million gallons from waste ethanol.

The cellulosic sugars: the intermediate producers

It’s widely expected that Renmatix will come out with big news before then end of the year. Last December, BASF and Renmatix signed a non-exclusive joint development agreement to scale up the Renmatix Plantrose process for the production of industrial sugars based on lignocellulosic biomass. The parties have agreed to key financial terms for future commercial licenses, which BASF can exercise at its discretion. The collaboration follows BASF’s $30 million investment in Renmatix in January 2012.

Another major partner from Renmatix? There’s UPM which chewed through an evaluation process for a source of cellulosic sugars as part of a focus on renewable chemicals within its BioFore strategy — an evaluation that eventually led to a deal with Renmatix. Observers were noting that the agreement is obviously aimed at the development, by mid-decade, of a commercial facility for UPM, presumably co-located at one of their pulp & paper mills.

Meanwhile, Stora Enso acquired Virdia in June for $33 million with additional potential payouts totaling approximately $29 million following completion of specific technical and commercial milestones by 2017. Founded in 2007 as HCL CleanTech, Virdia developed the CASE process, which converts cellulosic biomass to high quality fermentable sugars and lignin using acid hydrolysis (the HCL in the company’s former name referred to ‘hydrochloric acid’). Virdia’s CASE process also produces lignin in dry or soluble forms, which has proven to be feedstock for plant-based plastics and other thermo-chemical transformations.

And last year there were a flurry of deals from Sweetwater, which in January announced a 15-year commercial agreement with Colorado-based Front Range Energy, to supply renewable sugars for up to 3.6 million gallons of cellulosic ethanol per year during the initial phase of the relationship at Front Range’s current corn-ethanol facility. The agreement has a total potential value in excess of $100 million, and requires a minimal capital outlay by Front Range while stabilizing the company’s feedstock costs. The announcement mirrors a deal inked earlier with Ace Ethanol.

Definitely don’t overlook Proterro either. Two weeks ago, Proterro and Bunge announced a pilot study of Proterro’s sucrose-production technology in Brazil. Under a joint development agreement, a pilot plant is being commissioned at Bunge’s Moema Fazenda sugarcane mill, where two of Proterro’s photobioreactors have been installed to cultivate Proterro’s cyanobacteria for production of fermentable sugars for ethanol production.

The Bunge pilot plant will replicate the operations of Proterro’s U.S. pilot plant in Orlando, Florida, where four photobioreactors are currently deployed. “Testing performed at this site in Brazil is particularly valuable to our development and progress, as it represents a climate, geography and CO2 source that are representative of our anticipated commercial production plant,” said Proterro CEO Kef Kasdin.

The Bottom Line

As many things do, the dream of cellulosic ethanol began with a vision of hundreds of greenfield plants and some first-gen ethanol co-locates, all serving up ethanol for a market hungry for higher-ethanol blends such as E85.

It’s turned out to be much different, in three ways.

First, we’re seeing companies reach beyond the road transport markets.

Second, we’re seeing a whole bunch of new technologies to add on a couple of million gallons here, couple there.

Third, we’re seeing the rise of the intermediates – that may create a fungible market for large-scale volumes in industrial sugars for applications in ethanol as well as chemicals.