The Carbon Rescuers: 20 Top Waste projects and breakthroughs that capture used carbon from the waste pile for new uses

#4 Breaking the Bottleneck – POET-DSM achieves cellulosic biofuel breakthrough

In South Dakota, POET-DSM Advanced Biofuels achieved a major breakthrough in cellulosic biofuels production at its Project LIBERTY plant in Emmetsburg, Iowa. The company has solved the critical challenge in pretreatment, overcoming what has been the No. 1 hurdle to commercialization for producers around the world, according to their news release. Project LIBERTY is now running pretreatment at 80 percent uptime.

POET-DSM and other producers have identified the pretreatment stage in the past as the major chokepoint in commercial production. With a newly installed pretreatment system, designed by POET engineers, POET-DSM is now able to direct its attention to fine-tuning downstream processes and prepare for future licensing efforts that will spread this technology around the world.

“This is an enormous step forward for clean, American-made biofuel,” POET-DSM board member Jeff Lautt said. “Commercializing new technology is always a challenging task, and I’m proud of the commitment from our team in overcoming this major challenge and developing a path for replicating the technology at facilities across the U.S. and world.”

Not only has POET solved the challenge of pretreatment, it also announced construction of an on-site enzyme manufacturing facility to directly pipe DSM enzymes into the process and ramped up biomass purchasing in anticipation of increased production levels in 2018.

Breaking the Bottleneck – POET-DSM achieves cellulosic biofuel breakthrough