Inbicon sells out of cellulosic ethanol before demo plant's opening

Denmark’s Inbicon today opened its first demonstration facility producing cellulosic ethanol, but potential customers will have to wait.

Inbicon has already sold its first year of production to Statoil, which plans to blend the ethanol into the Danish fuel supply early next year. In addition, some of the ethanol is being reserved to fuel E-85 vehicles during next month’s COP-15 meeting in Copenhagen.

Inbicon CEO Niels Henriksen said the company spent about DKK 400 million ($80.6 million) to develop the process and plant, which is co-located with DONG Energy’s coal-fired Asnæs Power Station, to produce 5.4 million liters (1.4 million U.S. gallons) per year.

“It’s the biggest plant of its kind,” said Anders Eldrup, CEO of DONG Energy, in an interview with the Cleantech Group. “Others are struggling with it, but Inbicon found a way.”

Illinois-based Coskata opened its demo plant in October, with plans to produce far less than its 50,000 gallon-per-year capacity (see GM testing cellulosic ethanol from Coskata’s demo plant).

Inbicon's ceremony in Kalundborg, Denmark, was attended by Denmark’s Prince Joachim, Danish lawmakers and officials from utility DONG Energy, which is the parent company of Inbicon. The plant took about 14 months to build, Henriksen said.

“We were developing the process as we were building it, so it was a huge challenge for the organization,” he said.

Inbicon expects the plant to process 30,000 tons of straw each year, producing 5.4 million liters of ethanol, 13,000 tons of biopellets, and 10,500 tons of feed molasses.

The ethanol plant uses steam from Asnæs for its process and send pellets back to the power plant to be burned in order to produce more energy.

If the demonstration is successful, Inbicon plans to develop future plants in addition to licensing out the technology. The company is also promoting the technology as a retrofit for corn-based plants (see Inbicon pushes cellulosic biofuel processes).

Inbicon is already in talks with potential customers in Japan and the U.S., including Minn.-based Great River Energy for a potential project in North Dakota.

The process relies on enzymes to convert cellulose to ethanol. The enzymes at the Kalundborg plant are supplied by Novozymes and Danisco, competitors that together hold about 75 percent of the global enzyme market.

“This [opportunity] is so big, there is room for both,” Danisco CEO Tom Knutzen told the Cleantech Group at the plant inauguration today.

Knutzen said the plant is using Danisco’s Accellerase 1500, the second commercial version of its enzyme for biofuel. Knutzen said Danisco has been working with Inbicon almost since the inception of the project in order to optimize the process and the enzymes.

Knutzen said he expects the biggest growth sector for the biomass-to-ethanol technology to be in North America, which previously embraced corn ethanol.

“We’ve seen a reduced dependence on imported fuels” thanks to first-generation ethanol, he said. “Let’s use that platform and get into biomass fuels.”

Danisco—which also makes enzymes for detergents, textiles, and food—is working on other demo biofuel projects, although Knutzen declined to name them. However, he noted that DuPont Danisco Cellulosic Ethanol plans to open its Tennessee-based cellulosic ethanol demonstration plant in December or January, using feedstocks including corn cobs and switchgrass (see DuPont Danisco starts work on Tennessee biorefinery).

Inbicon’s plant currently produces ethanol from straw, but Inbicon plans to experiment with other feedstocks, including wheat straw, corn stover, bagasse, sorghum, and palm oil residue.

Inbicon's pre-treatment process uses hydro-thermal to wet and heat the wheat straw, which helps accelerate the breakdown and hydrolysis of the fibrous plant parts into ethanol. Inbicon uses the steam from Asnæs to cook the straw at 180 degrees Celsius for 10 minutes to break the lignocellulose surface, freeing the hemicellulose and cellulose, said Lene Haugaard Mikkelsen, optimization and laboratory manager for Inbicon.

Water is added to the mass, which is then pressed to remove the liquid. The liquid contains the sugars that will become molasses feed.

The solid that remains is sent to large tanks at 55 degrees for six hours, where enzymes are added to degrade the cellulosic composition and release glucose. Inbicon stores the mass as solid, as opposed to a liquid, because it takes less energy to heat and cool solids, Haugaard Mikkelsen said.

In the next tank, yeast promotes fermentation for 24 hours, converting the released sugar into ethanol. In the final stage of distillation, the mass is heated, allowing ethanol to evaporate. What’s left is the lignin, which is converted into pellets that can be burned to produce energy.

The ethanol plant is based on two proprietary technologies: the hydrothermal cooking and machinery that handles the straw, and the special tanks that were developed to handle high solids contents, Haugaard Mikkelsen said.

Inbicon’s project was funded by DONG Energy, the Danish government and the European Commission.

DONG Energy’s investment is part of its company-wide goal to move from 85 percent of its energy from fossil fuels to 85 percent from renewables, Eldrup said.

In September, DONG inaugurated the world’s biggest offshore wind farm, the 209 MW Horns Rev 2 project in the North Sea. The company has plans for five more wind farms to be launched soon.

In addition, DONG is removing functional coal-fired power plants from the grid. In 2008 and 2009 combined, DONG expects to have removed 25 percent of its coal-fired power plants, Eldrup said.

“It’s easy to say, but it’s a very big change for a company that has billions of kroners invested in traditional power plants,” Eldrup said.

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