The Northeast Biomass Conference & Expo Aug. 4-6 at Westin Copely Place in Boston will feature a biorefining panel titled, “Cutting-Edge Conversion Approaches: Breakthroughs in Biorefining.”
Stephen Fitzpatrick with Waltham, Mass.-based Biofine Technology LLC will present on the Biofine Process for thermocatalytic biomass refining. The process employs high temperatures and dilute-acid catalysis for rapid hydrolysis of lignocellulosic biomass to produce levulinic and formic acids, and biochar. Fitzpatrick said the process is carried out in a novel continuous reactor system that enhances yield for commercial applications.
“The process is flexible enough to utilize a wide range of lignocelluloses such as forest residues, waste paper or straw,” he said. “Derivative green products of interest include heating and transportation fuels, monomers and general chemicals.” Fitzpatrick said that a semi-commercial-scale plant is now operational in Gorham, Maine.
He said of particular commercial interest is the production of ethyl levulinate, a versatile fuel product that can be blended with heating oil, diesel or gasoline. “It is manufactured by combination of levulinic acid with ethanol,” he said. “The development of a renewable heating oil blending component that can be economically produced and used in the Northeast should be of great commercial interest.” He projected that the process can allow profitable production of heating oil blendstock from wood or agricultural residues for less than two dollars per gallon at large scale. “Ethyl levulinate can be blended directly or co-blended with biodiesel,” Fitzpatrick said.
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Kevin Gray, chief technology officer for Qteros, is scheduled to speak about the biomass-to-ethanol process based around the trademarked Q microbe, Clostridium phytofermentans, which he said has the natural ability to hydrolyze all types of polysaccharides in biomass and ferment those sugars into ethanol. “The genome sequence of the Q microbe shows the presence of over 105 different glycosyl hydrolases, and microarray analysis indicated that the glycosyl hydrolases were induced when the organism was grown in the presence of complex carbohydrates and down-regulated when grown on simple sugars,” he said. “Enzyme titration data has shown that the Q microbe achieves maximal productivity with one-fourth to one-fifth the amount of exogenous enzyme required by Saccharomyces cerevisae.”
Gray said a genetic system has been developed such that specific genes can be deleted or over-expressed in order to improve performance, adding, “this presentation will describe recent progress in strain and process development to meet commercial metrics.”
Maxwell Morton with Grayhead Associates is scheduled to moderate this panel. Other speakers include Polyflow Corp. chairman Joseph Hensel.
To register for the Northeast Biomass Conference & Expo, visit http://ne.biomassconference.com.