Biowaste to Fuel Firm Secures $232 Million USDA Loan Guarantee

27 January 2012

Lakewood, Colorado based biorefinery developer, ZeaChem, has been selected for a $232.5 million loan guarantee from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) 9003 Biorefinery Assistance Program.

According to the company, it has developed a cellulose-based biorefinery platform capable of producing advanced fuels and intermediate chemicals from woody biomass and agricultural waste such as corn stover with the highest yield, lowest capital cost, and lowest carbon footprint in the industry.

ZeaChem said that development of its first commercial cellulosic biorefinery is already underway, and that this conditional commitment enables the financing and construction of the plant.

The facility is to be located at the Port of Morrow in Boardman, Oregon and is adjacent to the company's 250,000 gallon per year (946,000 litre per year) integrated demonstration biorefinery.

The company said that it expects the new facility to have capacity of 25 million or more gallons per year (94.6 million litres) and that it has agreements for 100% of the required feedstock from the nearby GreenWood Tree Farm Fund (GTFF) and from local agricultural residue processors.

The Process

ZeaChem said that the technology it will be deploying at the site is a hybrid combination of biochemical and thermochemical processing steps that preserves the best of both approaches from yield and efficiency perspectives and utilises no new organisms or process.

After fractionating the biomass, the sugar stream (both xylose [C5] and glucose [C6]) are sent to fermentation where an acetogenic process is utilised to ferment the sugars to acetic acid without CO2 as a by-product.

In comparison, the company said that traditional yeast fermentation creates one molecule of CO2 for every molecule of ethanol. Thus ZeaChem claimed that the carbon efficiency of the its fermentation process is nearly 100% vs. 67% for yeast.

The acetic acid is converted to an ester which can then be reacted with hydrogen to make ethanol.

To generate the hydrogen necessary to convert the ester to ethanol, the company said that it takes the lignin residue from the fractionation process and gasifies it to create a hydrogen-rich syngas stream.

The hydrogen is separated and used for ester hydrogenation and the remainder of the syngas is combusted to generate steam and power for the process.

According to the company, the net effect of combining the two processes is that about 2/3 of the energy in the ethanol comes from the sugar stream and 1/3 comes from the lignin steam in the form of hydrogen.

"The USDA loan guarantee is a significant validation for ZeaChem's highly efficient, economical and flexible biorefinery technology," commented Jim Imbler, president and chief executive officer of ZeaChem.


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