Although it is hard to keep track of the several EU government-funded bio-based chemicals projects these days, I do wonder how many of these projects were able to reach beyond the pilot and demo stages and achieved commercialization milestones?
Anyway, France-based Global Bioenergies is among some of the public European start-up bio-based chemical companies that I have been tracking for years in terms of its bio-isobutene activities, and the company has been working in collaboration with several EU-funded projects. One is OPTISOCHEM (OPTimized conversion of residual wheat straw to bio-ISObutene for bio-based CHEMicals), which aims to demonstrate the performances, reliability as well as environmental and socio-economic sustainability of the entire value chains for the transformation of excess wheat straw into bio-Isobutene (bio-IBN) derivatives – oligomers (DIB, TIB, TeIB) and polyisobutylenes (PIBs).
The project is supported by the Bio-Based Industries Joint Undertaking (BBI-JU) the public-private sector partnership between the European Union and the Bio-Based Industries Consortium (BIC) under the European Horizon 2020 programme. Companies involved in this project include Global Bioenergies, Clariant, Ineos, and TechnipFMC. The project, which started in 2017, has a budget allocation of €19.1 million, and is expected to be completed in 2021.
Four ambitious objectives were defined for OPTISOCHEM:
- Demonstrate the production of wheat straw hydrolysate (WSH) and establish a quality standard to feed the IBN
fermentation unit, - Demonstrate the production of bio-IBN from WSH at pre-commercial scale,
- Demonstrate the quality of end products obtained with bio-IBN as a feedstock and using traditional commercial
processes designed for fossil-based IBN, - Determine and validate the targeted technical, economic as well as environmental/social sustainability performances to be achieved for a commercial plant project.
Global Bioenergies announced this week that it received €2.2 million for the OPTISOCHEM project after it has successfully converted sugars from wheat straw into bio-isobutene at its demo plant scale in Leuna, Germany. Clariant has used its Sunliquid® technology to produce the sugar-rich hydrolysates from wheat straw, which were then converted into isobutene in Global Bioenergies’ demo plant. This isobutene is then itself dedicated to be converted by INEOS into polymers and oligomers that can be used in any number of high-performance applications, particularly in cosmetics.
After an internal validation procedure set up by the BBI-JU, the consortium has just received the sum of €3.3 million, of which €2.2 million goes for Global Bioenergies.
Global Bioenergies is also part of the EU-funded REWOFUEL (REsidual soft WOod conversion to high characteristics drop-in bioFUELs) and Sweetwoods projects. The green blog is actually more interested in the Sweetwoods project and you can watch a short video explaining its objectives below.
