US biomass company Zeachem produces saleable bioethanol precursor

17 February 2010

Biomass biorefinery developer ZeaChem has produced bio-based acetic acid, which the company said is the building block for cellulosic ethanol and bio-based chemicals, at the purity concentration level of a saleable product.

Earlier this month, ZeaChem announced its 10,000 times scale-up fermentation results, which demonstrated the commercial scalability of the company’s front-end fermentation process using an acetogen, a naturally occurring organism.

Using the liquid produced in the fermentation runs, the company said it has now concentrated the acetic acid using an energy efficient process called solvent extraction that produces a highly pure acetic acid concentration known in the industry as glacial acetic acid.

‘ZeaChem’s biggest fermentation hurdles are now behind us and we have significantly de-risked future integrated operations,’ said Jim Imbler, president and CEO of ZeaChem. ‘Using commercially available processes, we have successfully produced saleable, bio-based acetic acid from our fermentation. ZeaChem has taken a big step toward producing high yield, economical and sustainable cellulosic ethanol and chemicals.’

The results surpassed ZeaChem’s demonstration plant targets for acetic acid recovery and purity, and have been replicated using two different commercial vendors. With the results, ZeaChem said it is moving forward using proven esterification technology for further product conversion, which converts acetic acid into ethyl acetate, the chemical precursor of ZeaChem produced cellulosic ethanol.

‘As we observed, these results prove the successful concentration to glacial acetic acid using commercially available equipment,’ said Tom Schafer, vice president of New Jersey-based Koch Modular Process Systems, which specialises in the design and supply of modular mass transfer systems engineered to fulfil the chemical, pharmaceutical, petrochemical, biotech, food, flavour and fragrance industries’ increasingly challenging purification requirements.

ZeaChem said it intends to scale to a commercial biorefinery upon successful operations at its 250,000 gallon-per-year facility, which is proposed to be built in Boardman, Oregon and that the core technology of the facility will begin to come online in 2010.

Incorporated in 2002, ZeaChem is headquartered in Lakewood, Colorado, US and operates a research and development laboratory facility in Menlo Park, California.

Copyright © 2010 NewNet

Tags: acetic acid, bioethanol, biorefinery, cellulosic ethanol

This story was published on Wednesday, February 17th, 2010 at 12:20 pm and is filed under North America, biomass/biofuel, companies. You can follow any responses to article entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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