This highly publicized research effort, carried out in phases over the first half of this decade by competing international enzyme makers Genencor International and Novozymes Inc., reduced the amount of “enzymatic loading” needed to unlock the complex sugars within non-grain ethanol feedstocks. Subsequently, some of the economic barriers of the process were effectively chipped away.
Scientific accolades aside, both companies are now maneuvering to integrate their past work into industrial-scale cellulose-to-ethanol projects. Meanwhile, other competitors like Jupiter, Fla.-based Dyadic International Inc. have emerged with their own unique strategies. Dyadic has been working with the Iowa Corn Promotion Board and the U.S. DOE over the past two years to develop a novel process technology to convert distillers grains and corn fibers into ethanol. “Filamented fungi of the world are what break down plant material into sugar in nature,” Dyadic President and CEO Mark Emalfarb says. “It’s the fungi that are scavenging the forest floor and metabolizing cellulosic materials, and the reason for this is that fungi secrete a variety of enzymes at once.”
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Indeed, it is the planet’s fungi that render industrial-scale cellulosic ethanol production ostensibly possible, if not yet viable. With genetic tools in place, it was speculated that the enzymatic secretions of certain fungi, which digest cellulose in order to live, could be dramatically increased. Moving from theory to practice, however, is rife with struggle.
So what has the DOE’s enzyme project enabled its participants to do in the wake of its completion? “We’ve been continuing to invest in our applications in the research effort around the biomass substrates,” says Jack Huttner, vice president of corporate communications and public affairs at Genencor. The enzyme maker is now focused on expanding its reach beyond the dilute acid hydrolysis of corn stover to other substrates and pretreatments. Huttner wasn’t specific about feedstocks or conversion platforms, other than saying, “They’re all the normal candidates. We’re not working on anything exotic.”
On a similar front, Novozymes plans to assist Broin Companies in its effort to commercialize corn stover-derived ethanol. “It’s our intention to move forward in our efforts with biomass, and we do that by finding partners in the industry to work with—Broin being one of those partners—as an extension of the work that has already gone into developing new cellulases,” says Novozymes North America Inc. Marketing Manager Chris Veit.
In fact, the DOE research effort focused not only on corn stover, but also corn fiber, a substrate that already exists at more than 100 corn-to-ethanol dry mills in the United States. Subsequently, Broin Companies has partnered with DuPont to expand an existing 50 MMgy corn dry mill into a 125 MMgy facility that would convert every part of the corn plant into ethanol and its coproducts. Voyager Ethanol, the Emmetsburg, Iowa, plant undergoing this transformation, will couple corn fractionation and lignocellulosic conversion technologies to produce ethanol from corn fiber and corn stover. The project is expected to greatly increase ethanol production efficiency.
The plant, which will also use Broin’s trademarked raw starch hydrolysis process, will obtain 11 percent more ethanol from a bushel of corn and 27 percent more ethanol from an acre of corn. The plant is also expected to use 83 percent less energy to operate.
DuPont’s process allows the high conversion of both C5 glucose sugars and the difficult-to-ferment C6 xylose sugars to ethanol at high yields, according to the company. The technology uses a microorganism called Zymomonas mobilis to make these conversions. In nature, this organism lives in solutions of high sugar concentrations, such as those derived from fruits and the sugar sap of plants, and is well-suited for the highly efficient conversion of sugar.
Converting corn fiber and stover into ethanol is a logical place to start, Veit says, because the raw materials are readily available and relatively responsive to known enzyme treatments. “You look at most substrates out there today that we are aware of, and the amount of enzyme needed to hydrolyze the substrate is significantly higher than corn stover,” Veit says.
The cocktail of enzymes that’s going to be needed for corn fiber hasn’t been perfected, but the enzymes developed in conjunction with the DOE will serve as a baseline for Novozymes’ new research and projects, according to Veit. While Genencor and Novozymes received funding under the same government program, the two didn’t collaborate in any way, and the products and services developed by both companies are exclusive and unique.
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