July 22, 2010

German specialty chemicals manufacturer Süd-Chemie AG announced it will begin constructing a demonstration-scale cellulosic ethanol production facility this fall near Straubing, Germany. The company has been operating a pilot-scale facility since 2009 and said the scale up to demonstration size is a step in its strategy to develop sustainable manufacturing processes for biofuels and chemicals.

"In view of the increasing expense and risks involved in excavating oil, we are making a significant contribution to providing a sustainable substitute for oil-based products," said Günter von Au, Süd-Chemie´s managing board chairman. "Compared with the first-generation biofuels already in use today, for instance biodiesel, which consist of fuel extracted from plant material containing oil and starch, second-generation biofuels like cellulose ethanol offer considerable advantages."

Once operational at the end of 2011, the demonstration plant will convert wheat straw into 2,000 tons of cellulosic ethanol annually, making it the largest cellulosic facility in Germany. The company's public relations manager, Jochen Orlowski, said the facility will be located in the center of Lower Bavaria's agricultural area and will likely source its feedstock from local farmers. The company plans to also test corn stover, bagasse, other agricultural wastes and energy plants from various regions around the world. "We already have adapted our sunliquid process to different feedstocks and will prove the conversion at the demonstration plant scale," he added.

The sunliquid process developed by Süd-Chemie consists of converting cellulose-based feedstocks into sugar constituents, which are then converted into ethanol. Using enzymes it has developed and produced, the company is able to convert the hemicellulose as well as the cellulose into ethanol, which it said can boost ethanol production by up to 50 percent. "We have a high-throughput-screening technology, among other things, in order to do enzyme testing and optimization to tailor the enzymes to the respective feedstocks," Orlowski said. "In addition, the sunliquid process has a process-integrated on-site production of feedstock-optimized enzymes at the production plant, which will lower the production cost significantly compared to external enzyme supply."

The entire demonstration project is expected to cost approximately $36 million. The Bavarian state government and Germany's federal ministry of education and research will each contribute approximately $6.4 million toward the project.

Orlowski said that if the demonstration project proves to be successful, Süd-Chemie will make the technology commercially available by 2013. "It is our business strategy to out-license the sunliquid process to ethanol producers as well as other interested companies, for example, from the mineral oil industry or large agricultural groups," he said. "So we will not become the ethanol producer but the technology partner providing the whole sunliquid process of cellulosic bioethanol manufacturing."