World's First Wood Cellulose to Biofuel Ethanol Plant was Canadian.

A previous post on the world's first commercial straw to ethanol plant being built in Spain attracts a lot of traffic to this site, and there is a lot of current interest about cellulosic sources of liquid fuel.

Even George W Bush, the Very Model of Modern-Major General, now knows the molecular structure of cellulose, and can say "cellobiohydrolase" without any hesitatation. He learnt this skill from Al Gore, who invented the internet.

To further improve his verbal fluency in matters technological or catalytical, George W is even studying this :

It Twas the Very Model of a Modern Biohydrolase

I am the very model of a modern Major-General
I've information vegetable, animal, and mineral
I know the kings of England, and I quote the fights historical
From Marathon to Waterloo, in order categorical

I'm very good at integral and differential calculus
I know the scientific names of beings animalculous
In short, in matters vegetable, animal, and mineral
I am the very model of a modern Biohydralous

This short lyrical interlude is just to reinforce Pundit's point that in converting straw to oil, enzyme catalysts such as cellobiohydrolases play crucial roles in cost efficient ethanol technology.

Biotechnology companies such as Iogen and Genencor use their special knowledge - of the vegetable and animal of beings animalculous - to create new rules for producing liquid fuel from farm produce, and epecially open up new options with current waste streams like straw whose energy content at present is largely wasted.

Pundit's popular previous post on biofuels mentions an earlier smaller cellulosic feedstock conversion plant in Canada operated by Iogen Corporation.

At full capacity Iogen's current demonstration plant is designed to process about 40 tonnes per day of feedstock, and to produce 3 to 4 million litres of ethanol per year. The plant can use wheat, oat, and barley straw as raw materials.

Here we supply more details about the Iogen steam explosion technology which involves treatment of wood (or straw) with dilute acid at high pressures. This steam explosion step is the key bottleneck in releasing cellulosic polymer sugars. It convert straw to an alterred expanded form thats more accessible to catalysts used for enzyme based conversion of insoluble material to sugars.

In turning staw into automobile fuel GM to make cheap enzyme catalysts and steam explosion go hand in hand. The companion technology of using genetic manipulation to drive catalyst cost down (see Novozymes post) is absolutely dependent of successful pre-treatments such as steam explosion for economic success. Interestingly the Iogen website is rather shy about revealing that GM technology is crucial to the economic success of these "sustainable fuel" inititiatives.

Iogen Corporation
From the "Wood-Ethanol Report" by Environment Canada, 1999

Iogen is a Canadian company whose predecessor companies were founded in the 1970's. The company's initial research was on the steam explosion process for straw and wood to increase the digestibility of the feedstock as a source of animal feed. The impetus for the work was the skyrocketing grain costs of the early 1970's. Since that time the company has grown and expanded its research into the production of ethanol from lignocellulosics and the production and marketing of enzymes for a variety of applications. Iogen is Canada's only industrial enzyme manufacturer.

Iogen has sales between $10 and $20 million per year from its enzyme business.[Note this statement dates to pre-1999] This private company claims to have been profitable for the past five years. It also claims to have spent $40 million developing its technology over the past 25 years. Natural Resources Canada has contributed over $6 million of the total.

There are 65 people on staff at Iogen including 20 to 30 in research and development. The key staff members have been with the company for over ten years. Iogen has owned and operated a one tonne per day fully integrated pilot plant in Ottawa since 1985. The facility includes pretreatment, hydrolysis, fermentation, distillation, and co-product recovery stages.

In November 1997 Iogen signed an agreement with Petro-Canada whereby Petro-Canada will co-fund research and development, and the construction of a plant in Ottawa to demonstrate the commercial feasibility of the technology. The plant is expected to cost between $15 and $30 million. Construction has begun at a site near the Ottawa airport. Petro-Canada will earn the exclusive rights to use the technology in Canada for plants to meet its own needs for ethanol. Petro-Canada positioned their investment as part of an evolution of their business to meet the challenges of reducing fossil fuel greenhouse gas emissions.

Iogen has alliances with F. Hoffman-LaRoche to develop enzymes for animal feeds and the National Research Council of Canada for improvement of enzyme properties with protein engineering techniques.
Technology

The Iogen process is an enzymatic hydrolysis process for converting lignocellulosics to ethanol. The unique aspects of the technology include the steam explosion pretreatment that was pioneered by Iogen, and the proprietary enzymes developed, manufactured, and marketed by Iogen. Iogen has patents in Canada and other countries for aspects of both the steam explosion and enzyme production. The block diagram for the Iogen process is shown in Figure 1.

(Figure 1: Iogen Enzymatic Process.)

The pretreatment step involves steam explosion with dilute acid conducted at elevated temperatures and pressures. The hydrolysis and fermentation steps are undertaken at ambient temperatures and pressures. Distillation is the normal ethanol industry process.

Iogen is currently building a commercial demonstration facility on a 13 acre site adjacent to the Ottawa airport. The plant is designed to process several truckloads of feedstock per day to validate the Iogen process. It will operate 24 hours per day and will allow the scale up to a 100 million litre a year plant without difficulty. Eventually, the facility will have over 20,000 sq. ft. of building space including a five story section.

The new facility will produce sugars as the primary product. Iogen will use the sugars in their enzyme manufacturing business. They were one of the first companies to be able to use glucose as the feed material for the organism producing the cellulase enzyme rather than the more expensive lactose. A small stream of product will be fermented to produce ethanol in order to validate the process. This configuration will allow Iogen to operate the facility at essentially a break even level as the sugars have a higher value to Iogen than ethanol in the marketplace. This configuration will overcome the barriers that others have faced with the high cost of operating pilot or demonstration plants.

The Iogen process is currently suitable for agricultural residues such as wheat straw and corn stover. Hardwood residues are also a suitable feedstock. A single step pretreatment process for agricultural and hardwood residues is able to produce a material that can be efficiently hydrolyzed by the enzymes. The pretreatment process is not as effective for separating the lignin of softwoods from the cellulosic material and thus the enzymes are not as effective. Much higher levels of enzymes are required and the production and capital costs are also much higher. Iogen has no plans to do further work on optimizing the pretreatment of softwoods at this time. They believe that there are sufficient feedstocks available in Canada that are suitable for their process that it is not necessary to look at softwoods now.

The feedstocks chosen by Iogen, although easy to pretreat, yield a significant quantity of pentose sugars and thus introduce the problem of fermenting these sugars to ethanol. Iogen has no proprietary technology in this area and is planning to utilize yeast licensed from one of the leading developers of the new genetically engineered yeasts that are capable of fermenting pentose sugars. Iogen has done animal feed trials of this pentose containing material but believe that fermenting the sugars to ethanol is currently the best option. There is some risk in Iogen's approach to the pentose sugars as others have found significant problems moving from the lab to larger scale fermentations. One of the process configurations that Iogen is considering is the removal of lignin prior to fermentation. This may remove some inhibitors to the yeast and make the yeast more effective but this is clearly an important step to be demonstrated before any commercial plants can be considered.

The process will produce lignin as a co-product. The relatively mild pretreatment process employed should provide a lignin that can be utilized as a starting material in other processes. In the 1980's Iogen did a substantial amount of work looking for high value markets for the lignin produced by their process. One of the applications investigated was phenol-formaldehyde resin and the work proceeded to mill trials. The work increased the understanding of the product but was not sufficiently promising to proceed to a commercial stage. One of the goals of the facility under construction is to be able to produce sufficient quantities of various lignin products so as to be able to properly investigate potential markets for the products. The fall back position is that the lignin would be utilized as a fuel to produce steam or electricity. This yields a very low price for the lignin, no more than 5 cents per kilogram.

The process will produce a large quantity of liquid waste with a high BOD and COD that must be treated and disposed of. The technology to do this is readily available but does add to the cost and energy intensity of the process. The energy intensity may become an issue if the fuel is something other than recovered lignin. If, for example, a high value market developed for lignin and natural gas provided some of the fuel there would be some discussion over how to value the energy value of co-products much as there exists a discussion on how to value Distillers Dried Grains (DDG) from grain.

Company delivers straw waste ethanol to refinery

Last Updated: Thursday, April 22, 2004 | 2:11 PM ET
CBC News
After more than 20 years and $110-million worth of research, a Canadian company has found a way to make "greener" gasoline on a commercial scale.

Iogen Corporation of Ottawa has developed enzymes to break down waste straw and wood chips into ethanol on a commercial scale.

"This is our big Eureka moment, because this is the first time in the world that such large quantities of cellulose ethanol have been made," said Jeff Passmore, vice president of Iogen on Wednesday, the eve of Earth Day...



More on Iogen in an MIT Technology Review plus the long term projections:

Redesigning Life to Make Ethanol
Genetically engineered organisms can more efficiently produce ethanol from cheap and abundant sources of biomass, such as agricultural waste. It could make ethanol cost competitive.
By Jamie Shreeve

...In 2004, Iogen, a Canadian biotechnology company based in Ottawa, began selling modest amounts of cellulosic ethanol, made using common wheat straw as feedstock and a tropical fungus genetically enhanced to hyperproduce its cellulose-digesting enzymes. But Iogen estimates that its first full-scale commercial plant, for which it hopes to break ground in 2007, will cost $300 million -- five times the cost of a conventional corn-fed ethanol facility of similar size...

Among biofuels, ethanol is the established front-runner, but various types of microbes also produce hydrogen, methane, biodiesel, and even electricity -- which means they could be genetically engineered to produce more of these resources. At the University of California, Berkeley, bioengineer Jay Keasling and his colleagues are proposing to design organisms that pump out a fuel no natural microbe makes, one that offers some alluring advantages over ethanol: gasoline. Its virtues as a fuel are proven, of course, and the ability to produce it from waste wood and waste paper, which Keasling thinks is feasible, could reduce countries' dependence on foreign oil. And unlike ethanol, which is water soluble and must be transported in trucks lest it pick up water in pipes, biologically generated octane could be economically piped to consumers, just like today's gas.

"Ethanol has a place, but it's probably not the best fuel in the long term," says Keasling. "People have been using it for a long time to make wine and beer. But there's no reason we have to settle for a 5,000-year-old fuel."

In the short term, some advances in biology and engineering are needed before fuels made from biomass will be practical and competitive with fossil fuels. But in the longer term, says Venter, "we're limited mostly by our imagination, not by the limits of biology."

See also Geeky details on cellulase enzyme catalysts