Alliance BioEnergy partners with Harvesting Technology to enhance ethanol production process

Alliance BioEnergy Plus has formed a strategic alliance with Harvesting Technology (HT) for the inclusion of its licensed and patented advanced separation process.

Alliance plans to utilise the separation technology alongside its CTS cellulose conversion process in ethanol applications. 

When used in a dry mill corn ethanol plant, the HT process is able to separate the backend whole stillage into an additional one pound of distillers corn oil (DCO) per bushel – more than double the current process – and other high fiber distiller’s grain co-products.

At the same time, the system reduces the need for high energy centrifuges and evaporators.

The co-products can then be processed through Alliance’s CTS unit and fermented into high quality cellulosic ethanol, adding up to 6 million gallons of ethanol output to a 55 million gpy plant without bringing in an outside feedstock. 

With the sale of the additional DCO and the added cellulosic ethanol output produced through the combination of Alliance’s process and the HT separation unit, more than $41 million (€36.7m) can potentially be added to the bottom-line of an existing corn ethanol plant.

Additionally, because of the CTS modular design, it can easily convert up to 1,000 tonnes a day of virtually any outside cellulose feedstock, which presents another possibility of increasing the bottom-line by an additional $40 million through the increased cellulosic ethanol output and advanced biofuel incentives.

The processes can each be bolted on to an existing ethanol plant for a fraction of the cost involved with building a new facility.

“For the first time this gives an ethanol producer an option to use what they have in-house to increase output, or bring in outside biomass to seriously increase output, or both,” said Alliance CEO Daniel de Liege

The HT process is currently running successfully at an operating ethanol plant in Illinois and should prove to be a strategic enhancement to Alliance’s CTS cellulose conversion process in ethanol applications, the company says.