(454a) Leveraged Process Development for Biomass to Ethanol

Overview: Visionary talks (invited) will outline commercial, governmental, or academic efforts to advance multi-product biorefineries. Topics likely to be addressed include: development or improvement -- including conceptual analysis and sustainability assessments -- of renewable feedstocks-based multiproduct biorefineries, i.e., based on starch or oil crops and/or lignocellulosic biomass; development of enabling catalytic and/or separative processes; discovery or development of enabling enzyme or fermentative/microbial technologies or bio-based materials.

Appropriate integration of process development steps in the biomass to ethanol process is a challenge.  Building a fully flexible pilot plant to allow for multiple process configurations is cost prohibitive for most technology developers.  For lack of fully integrated data, technoeconomic models can be employed to integrate smaller scale or individual unit operation data into the context of a full process to determine the best operational configuration and production cost.  Furthermore, these models can be used to compare competing process concepts, both for state of technology as well as at n-th state conditions.

This talk will present the Novozymes 2G flexible cost model and illustrate through several Novozymes process development examples how it has been used to assimilate results from Pretreatment through Fermentation to establish winning process concepts.  The latest small and large scale hydrolysis data using the new commercial cellulase enzyme Cellic CTec3 on several different feedstocks will be presented, as well as some insights into what the models can tell us about the likely short and long term impacts of enzyme development on the Minimum Ethanol Selling Price.