Competitive Edge: MetGen

April 30, 2020 |

Q: What was the reason for founding your organization – what was the open niche you saw that could be addressed with a new product or service? What was the problem, or gap, or opportunity?

MetGen vision is to empower industries to get the most out of biomass.

According to our vision, we are driven to find renewable alternatives to oil-based products and chemicals. We believe that everything that is made from oil today, can be made of wood tomorrow.

To fulfill our purpose, we had to create a robust enzymatic technology platform to serve our target markets at an industrial scale. While MetGen is deeply rooted in science it is a market-driven company that works hard to understand and meet the needs of individual customers.

We provide to our customer enzymatic solution to de-bottleneck challenges of modern lignocellulosic biorefineries.

Q: Tell us about your organization. What do you do?

Enzymatic solutions for:

1. Hydrolysis

2. Cellulosic sugar conversion (i.e glucose to fructose, glucose to glucosone, etc.)

3. Fiber modification for MFC and CNC production improvement

4. MetGen’s enzymatic fractionation technology METNIN.

Q: What stage of development are you?  Choose one:

Demonstration stage – proven at small, integrated scale, but not yet commercially available

Q: What do your technologies, products or services do and accomplish – how does it (they) work, who is it (they) aimed for?

METNIN lignin conversion technology enables for the first-time cost-effective conversion of lignin to biopolymeric materials and platform chemicals. Our technology enables cost-efficient conversion of lignin into cascade of intermediate building blocks of specific molecular size, which allows functionalization and enhances the applicability to variety of different applications, depending on the selected end-user applications and requirements. Lignin has shown to have great potential in replacing oil in many applications, including resins, polyols, polymers, coatings, rubber composite and cosmetics.

Q: Competitively, what gives your technology, product or service set an edge in cost or performance, sustainability, or any other aspect, that makes it stand out from the crowd, In short, what makes it transformative?

Lignin conversion technology, enzymatic fractionation METNIN, is superior to state of the art in terms of high yield, low operational costs and capital expense requirements, and high functionalization of output. Moreover, modified and fractionated lignin provides a tailored material for variety of applications. Similarly, to oil, crude lignin must be refined to match the chemical properties required by the customer applications. METNIN technology provides the missing link in the value-chain by modifying lignin in this way.

Our hydrolysis enzymes are robust and tailored to customer specific biomass. As differentiating factor, we offer opportunity for onsite enzyme production.

Sugar conversion enzymes opening sustainable way to produce FDCA and open up the route to biobased plastics.

Q: What are the 3 top milestones you have accomplished in the past 3 years?

  1. MetGen received the grant, as part Horizon 2020 flagship project SWEETWOODS. Sweetwoods is 43 Mln biorefinery is under construction in Estonia.
  2. METNIN – lignin fractionating technology is ready and available for licensing
  3. Hydrolysis and sugar conversion enzymatic technologies were moved to higher TRL level. Basic engineering packages are in final development stages.

Q: What are the top milestones you will accomplish in the next 3 years?

Our primary milestone for the next 3 years is to participate as partner or supplier in at least 10 lignocelluosic biorefineries projects.

Q. Where can I learn more about MetGen?

Click here to visit MetGen’s website.

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