Clariant conducted tests on 30 tons of miscanthus as sunliquid feedstock

In Germany, Clariant announced that it has conducted tests on approximately 30 tons of miscanthus provided by INA, Croatia’s leading oil and gas company. The miscanthus biomass was harvested and baled at the INA demonstration site in Croatia in February this year and shipped for processing to Clariant’s pre-commercial sunliquid plant in Straubing, Germany for conversion into lignocellulosic sugars and ethanol.

INA is a consortium member of the publicly funded project “GRowing Advanced industrial Crops on marginal lands for biorEfineries” (GRACE www.grace-bbi.eu). The GRACE project has received funding from the „Bio-based Industries Joint Undertaking“(BBI JU) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. The consortium consists of 22 partners from universities, the agricultural sector and the industry.

The aims and objectives of the project are to optimize various miscanthus value chains, to produce sustainable products with a strong market potential and to develop miscanthus as a sustainable feedstock resource for cultivation on marginal, contaminated and abandoned land. Against this background, Clariant was asked by the GRACE consortium to run tests of miscanthus as a feedstock for the production of lignocellulosic sugars and ethanol.

Final results prove that the sunliquid technology can successfully convert miscanthus biomass into lignocellulosic sugars and ethanol, confirming the benefits of the sugar process platform. Thanks to the flexible sunliquid process design, lignocellulosic sugars can be generated as an intermediate product that have the potential to serve as a building block for future production of bio-based chemicals. Making further use of Clariant’s proprietary enzyme platform for feedstock specific enzymes can finally open up the full potential of this promising energy crop.