by Jim Lane (Biofuels Digest) … Midori reports they have broken through on a 100-year quest for low-cost cellulosic sugars. And found a way to turn your cotton tees into sugars, too.
About a year ago, a little-known company called Midori Renewables picked up some traction from the invited international selectors in the 50 Hottest Companies in Bioenergy. It was a small group that was “in the know” — after all, the company’s foundational technology had only started coming forward in 2010 and the venture was very much in stealth mode, out of the Flagship VentureLabs – the source of companies such as Joule Unlimited
The promise of the technology was simple: a revolutionary way to deliver low-cost sugars — perhaps the most stubborn barrier between cellulosic biofuels as a triumph in the lab, and cellulosic biofuels as a triumph at the pump.
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The technology may surprise. There’s no biology in it, really – no enzymes, no magic micro-organism — fungus, yeast, bacteria, protein, aqueous acid, or what have you. It is a solid material — though one temporarily shrouded in some mystery — but one that reportedly can be easily separated from the reaction and reused, resulting in a significantly lower cost solution than existing technologies.
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“It’s a little like taking biomass and baking a cake,” said Baynes (Dr. Brian Baynes, Founder and Chairman of Midori). “You mix it up with the catalyst, shove it into an oven — or, at scale, into a reactor. The sugars are melted off of the cellulose. You wash it with water, until you have a stream that looks like maple syrup then you separate out all the solid residuals. It’s not hard for that step, because the trick is that we are using a very dense material that sinks very rapidly to the bottom of the reactor where it is recovered for re-use.
“As everyone knows, a lot of biology or new technology, it’s a challenge. The necessary operations are hard to scale. But in our case, every unit we have is one where there has been processing done this way for 50 years.
“The invention dates back to 2010, and we were at gram scale then, then kilogram scale, and now we are a ton per day. The technology actually gets better with scale.
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“It’s too early to pin down the costs precisely, and some of that will vary from feedstock to feedstock, and to the extent that we have to do extra processing on the sugars to make them work for a given partner.
“For example, the sugars come in C5s and C6s, which are important to different partners to differing extents. Plus, when you hydrolyze hemicellulose there is acetic acid released…
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“Looking at the economics, though — if you had completely ideal scale and conversion costs and perfect feedstocks and costs in line, it could be 3-4 cents per pound. We’re looking at low single digits.
Will it work for any company and feedstock? It’s broad. READ MORE and MORE (Midori Renewables)