The Inbicon Biomass Technology Campus doesn’t look like a campus. Instead of ivy-covered walls, a gray steel skin and Danish-modern design disguise the growth of scientific knowledge going on inside. The industrial hub surrounding the biomass refinery reinforces the perception of heavy-duty manufacturing and processing, not the generation and exchange of paradigm-changing technical ideas.  



But Niels Henriksen, CEO of Inbicon, sees things differently, taking a more expansive view of the Inbicon Biomass Refinery humming away at Kalundborg port. To him, it’s not just a demonstration of how wheat straw is converted into cellulosic ethanol and other renewable energies. He describes it as “the first flower” of a burgeoning technology campus whose goal is three-fold: continue the refinement of Inbicon’s biomass conversion technology; accelerate the commercialization of that technology by helping develop renewable energy projects around the world; and, most important to Henriksen, his third aim, “To provide a yeasty atmosphere for learning,” he says. “We never want to stop learning about the performance characteristics of various biomasses and how to extract maximum value from them, with increasing efficiency.” 



Though the physical heart of the tech campus is the 100-metric-ton-per-day plant at the western end of Zealand island, campus facilities also encompass two pilot plants and a full-scale research laboratory located just across the water at Fredericia, on the east side of the Jutland peninsula. Beyond Denmark, the flow of knowledge circulates worldwide among scientists and engineers, collaborators and customers, developers, inventors and investors from Japan in the East to America’s Pacific coast in the West. “Last year we signed our first technology licensing agreement with Mitsui for projects in Southeast Asia to turn palm fruit waste into ethanol,” Henriksen explains. “And today we’re planning new commercial-scale business models for Europe and North America.”  



Danish universities contributed important research early on. Benny Mai, Inbicon’s vice president in charge of the Kalundborg refinery, cites a recent example of how Inbicon collaborates with university scientists. For three weeks during late summer, Inbicon invited Jane Lindedam of Copenhagen University to work at Kalundborg. Her doctorate focus, which had been the cellulose content of different straws, found some types produced a 30 percent higher yield of ethanol. In her post-doc work on recycling enzymes, she required a deeper understanding of the Inbicon process. 



“She immediately swung into action to help with a technical problem in our molasses process,” Mai says. “With good teamwork between our process engineers and Jane, both parties came to new insights and the problem was solved. So we’re very happy to have her come back periodically and do more research during her three-year post-doc period.”





Is Bigger Better?    

The Inbicon Biomass Refinery in Kalundborg has an annual processing capacity of 30,000 metric tons of biomass, which it converts into three clean-energy streams: 1.5 million gallons of cellulosic ethanol, which Statoil blends with petrol for Danish motorists; 8,250 metric tons of clean lignin pellets, used as a solid biofuel in combined heat and power units; and 11,100 metric tons of C5 molasses, suitable for conversion into renewable energy or green chemistry products. 



“Size matters,” says Christian Morgen, Inbicon’s senior marketing manager. “It accelerates learning. In 2003, our first pilot plant could handle 2.4 metric tons of biomass a day. In 2005, we built a bigger one, which could process 24 tons a day. Now, with Kalundborg, our design capacity is four tons an hour.  The higher operating rates let us test larger quantities of biomass faster, and measure results based on near-commercial conditions-not possible before. So our analyses have great reliability, including estimates of capital and operating costs when we scale up.”



Benny Mai points out advantages to having a range of options for tech campus research. With the technology demonstration being focused at Kalundborg, the 2.4 MT/d and 24 MT/d pilot plants are freed for other tasks. The smaller is used primarily for biomass testing, while the larger is ideal for equipment testing before scaling up to commercial size. Both can be available to potential licensees, facilitating more frequent material transfer at larger quantities. More varieties from different crops around the world can cycle through. In the past seven years, in addition to straw, Inbicon has proven its process on a variety of soft biomasses, including corn stover, corn cobs, sugar bagasse, miscanthus grass, sorghum, and residues from palm oil production. 



 “We can provide a detailed description of the biomass analysis, product description, general mass and energy balance, and the general economics of the proposed project,” Mai says. The biomass description, for example, breaks out the fractions:  water by percentage, and cellulose, hemicellulose, lignin, ash, and other solids by percentage of dry matter.



Getting high-quality data back can cut planning time for many different types of renewable projects. In the U.S., for instance, it’s helpful to know if switchgrass, arundo, and miscanthus have enough energy in the crop to make a biomass refinery feasible. Developers in New York, who are using biomass refinery projects to rebuild the state’s agriculture, can determine whether grasses grown in now-uncultivated shale soil are feasible.

Beyond biomass testing, Inbicon is working at Kalundborg with different enzyme suppliers who want to test their latest advances in near-commercial operation and compare results to those already obtained in a lab environment. Two leading developers, Novozymes and Genencor, are in Denmark; Novozymes is actually next door in the Kalundborg industrial park. 



For targeted explorations into higher-value bioproducts, specialists in C5 conversion can obtain plenty of clean material from the Inbicon Biomass Refinery. Ethanol plant operators can extend their knowledge base on biomass utilization to help decide the best next steps for their individual businesses. EPC contractors can preview the technology and thoroughly understand it before building the 1,200 MT/d Inbicon Biomass Refineries designed for North America and Europe, each producing 20 MMgy of cellulosic ethanol. A refinery staff can be trained in advance. Some developers are using the campus to gain better knowledge of inputs and outputs for cross-platform systems. Government agencies are welcome to use Kalundborg to get better data for policy decisions.





Waste or Energy?

Visitors soon become aware that the walls of the biomass refinery aren’t the boundaries of the technology campus. The refinery is integrated with the adjacent coal-fired Asnæs Power Station, Denmark’s largest. It’s another opportunity to see the technology in action and learn from the results. Waste steam from the power station cooks the biomass, boosting the power station’s efficiency. Lignin from the refinery-so clean it’s used without additional and expensive purification-goes to augment coal-firing in Denmark’s power plants, producing green electricity.



“This kind of symbiotic energy exchange helps our customers build sustainable, carbon-neutral businesses,” Henriksen says. At commercial scale in the U.S., “power plants can nearly double their efficiency.”



Beyond these two major facilities are seven neighboring businesses interlinked to form a group called Industrial Symbiosis. Over the past 30 years, as new businesses arrived, they developed a cooperative web for economic advantage and environmental benefit. It wasn’t planned. It came about gradually from managers living in the same small town of 20,000, many belonging to the Rotary Club. Somebody’s waste, they discovered through dialogue, could be somebody else’s energy-or somebody else’s raw material. They found 27 ways of working together: three water recycling projects, six exchanges of energy and nine recycling of waste products. By utilizing each other’s residue and byproducts on a commercial basis, virtually everything is recycled, and productivity is increased without consuming more energy, water or raw materials.  





Clean Energy Parks of 2020

Is symbiotic thinking a springboard to clean energy parks of the future? Will a widening variety of new technologies produce renewable energy more efficiently by using interconnected methods of production? Instead of one manufacturer on one site, Henriksen says look for more co-locations, more clustering, more sharing of resources and utilization of one another’s wastes in increasingly productive and cost-cutting ways. It meshes with his vision of what the Inbicon Biomass Technology Campus will be exploring over the next 30 years. 



Gasification technology is already being developed on the Inbicon campus, and the pilot of its Renescience Municipal Waste Refinery is operating in Copenhagen.



Henriksen is already planning the next stages of a sustainable and digitally connected tech campus. In some cases, satellite branches will crop up around the world in the form of pilot plants, each located at the site where the biomass testing needs to be done, usually in cases where the biomass is perishable and cannot be safely shipped.



“There isn’t one solution to clean energy,” he says. “We like the path we’ve taken, but we’re opening as much dialogue as possible because we never want to stop learning. We invite leaders from the energy, investment, process engineering, and environmental communities, as well as government representatives, to participate in the conversation. From innovative thinkers we haven’t yet met, we believe many options will surface we haven’t yet imagined-ideas that will transform how clean energy is produced in the future.”



Authors: Thomas Corle and Roger Moore

Consultants, G-team

tcorle@biopowered.biz

rmoore@biopowered.biz



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