Green Biologics inks Iowa demo plant deal with Easy Energy Systems

Back to Butanol School

For those less familiar with the 4-carbon butanol (as opposed to 2-carbon ethanol), it’s been widely tipped for years to ultimately be the molecule of choice for the US Corn Belt. It’s been a much tough technology puzzle — but the business case for producing fuels and chemicals using a four-carbon platform is solid. On the chemicals side, there are a range of $5 per gallon applications, or even higher prices. On the fuels side, though the prices are lower, the blending rates are much higher for butanol with gasoline, the energy density is much higher than ethanol, and there’s no need for a flex-fuel vehicle to run, in terms of vehicle operation, a 50-50 blend of butanol and gasoline. So, lots of upside relative to ethanol.

The problems have been two-fold. First, a fermentation process with sufficient yield. Two, a process that can utilize cellulosic material.

Now, to complicate matters just a little, there’s isobutanol and n-butanol — the former is better for fuels, the latter is better for chemicals. Gevo and Butamax have been working on isobutanol, and have made substantial progress towards scale — especially Gevo, which is now operating at its first commercial facility in Luverne, Minnesota.

C5s and corn waste

On the n-butanol front, there have been Cobalt Technologies and Green Biologics. Not only are both focused, primarily, on chemicals — they both are focused on cellulosic waste as a feedstock (Gevo and Butamax, for now, are producing from corn starch). Turns out that producing n-butanol from C5 sugars (found in cellulose and hemicellulose) is much easier than doing the same for isobutanol.

A differentiating point between Green Biologics and Cobalt has been the feedstock of focu,. Though Cobalt is a US company, it has lately been focused on sugarcane bagasse and its ambitions are rightly pointed towards Brazil. By contrast, Green Biologics has been working on grain residues — corn stover, generally — and has been aimed at the US and China.

In today’s Digest, we look at Green Biologics and the Iowa project, 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.