The Big Biofuels Blog

with an announcement yesterday between a biofuels producer, Abengoa Bioenergy and fungus-technology company Dyadic International , according to a post on The Energy Blog, and one a couple of days ago between Broin and Novozymes, which also has a collaboration with Abengoa Bioenergy.

Dyadic International says its proprietary fungal strains based around Chrysosporium lucknowense could convert up to half of the dry distillers grain produced after fermentation into fermentable sugars . This is because the fungus produces a range of cellulases, enzymes which will try to digest cellulose. Around 3.7m tons of dry distillers grains were generated in 2003 in US dry-grind ethanol production, according to the US National Corn Growers Association. If that were fermented it could go some way to help crops replace oil.

Dyadic's fungal enzyme technology looks so promising that Abengoa Bioenergy R&D has bought around 2m Dyadic shares for $10m in a private deal to fund a three-year research and development agreement

Dyadic will use the cash to fund large-scale enzyme production systems and manufacturing processes to make low cost fermentable sugars from biomass, with initial focus on cellulosic ethanol production.

Abengoa Bioenergy has been very busy in the US lately. According to the SeekingAlpha blog,

In November 2005 Abengoa finalized financing for an 88 million gallon per year corn ethanol manufacturing plant in Ravenna , Nebraska and it's scheduled for completion in early 2007.

Upon completion of the Ravenna facility, Abengoa Bioenergy will be able to produce 203 million gallons of ethanol in the U.S. each year, in addition to its current annual capacity of 85 million gallons in Spain , and with an additional 53 million gallon facility expected to be completed in Spain within the next few months. In May 2006 it started construction of the first bioethanol facility in Europe to utilize corn as the raw material.

The Lacq facility will be capable of producing 200,000 tons of bioethanol utilizing corn and wine alcohol as raw material.

The U.S. Department of Energy and Abengoa Bioenergy R&D signed a 4-year, $35.5 million ( U.S. ) contract in 2003 to develop the technology for Advanced Biorefining of Distillers Grain and Corn Stover Blends.

It looks like the agreement with Dyadic could go some way towards that commitment.

Under this contract Abengoa Bioenergy R&D, in collaboration with Novozymes North America, Inc., the National Renewable Energy Laboratory [NREL], and Stake Technology, is developing novel biomass-derived process technology that utilizes advanced bio-refined Distiller's Grain and Corn Stover blends to achieve significantly higher bioethanol yields while maintaining the protein feed value

Corn Stover, is likely to be a good source of energy

This nicely brings us on to Novozymes. That firm is building up its real estate in the biofuels from cellulose sector with a number of deals including collaboration with Broin. Jeff Broin says the collaboration is

to commercialise ethanol from corn stover is a continuation of a partnership. Our previous collaboration to create raw starch hydrolysing enzymes fro out BPX process was highly successful

The BPX process is a method of hydrolysing raw starch to sugars and gives higher ethanol yields, uses up to 15% less energy than other methods. Broin has used an acid fungal amylase enzyme that is specific to the process which can be combined with Broin's fractionation technology could provide the foundation for biorefineries in the future, and Broin thinks that the technology to make celulose to ethanol conversion a reality could be developed in the next four to six years.

Broin also signed a deal with DuPont the other day to further work that DuPont has done since 2003 with the US Department of Energy in the Integrated Corn-Based BioRefinery. DuPont says its

Fermentation process, developed with its partners, allows high conversion of both C6 glucose sugars and difficult-to-ferment C5 xylose sugars to ethanol at high yields. The Integrated Biorefinery technology uses a micro-organism called Zymomonas mobilis (LINK) to make these conversions. In nature, this organism lives in solutions of high sugar concentrations, such as those derived from fruit and the sugar sap of plants, and so is highly suited for highly efficient conversion of sugar sap of plants.

Something tells me it’ll be a rocky road to the sweet spot of bioethanol from corn waste, but if companies of this size are investing time and money then it could be closer than some naysayers think... am I right?

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