Inbicon brings cellulosic technology to commercial scale

Danish biotech pioneer Inbicon has announced a series of technical and marketing initiatives for bringing commercial-scale cellulosic ethanol to the US.

Under the banner of The New Ethanol, and in collaboration with US-based G-team, Inbicon will incorporate its proprietary technology into a new pathway for converting biomass to ethanol.

CEO Niels Henriksen says: ‘Our new model of the Inbicon Biomass Refinery will allow US grain-ethanol plants to add 20 million gallons a year of ethanol to their output.

The new model generates its own bio-power, enough to not only produce ethanol but also send a significant amount of green electricity and steam to the host plant, cutting the host’s energy costs dramatically.

Inbicon’s vice-president Michael Persson will be speaking about these developments at the upcoming Biofuels International expo & conference in Amsterdam on the 27-28 May.

Persson will speak at the two day event in a designated cellulosic ethanol stream along with Ineos Bio, Tereos, Novozymes, TNO and Bical.

‘Bringing Inbicon’s cellulosic technology to commercial scale,’ says Persson, ‘will help producers start taking advantage of government mandates.’

For nearly six years, Inbicon has been testing, perfecting, and patenting its biomass conversion process at its pilot plant in Denmark.

‘Instead of focusing on making ethanol, we’ve concentrated on adding value to biomass by converting it into other forms of energy,’ says Henriksen.

‘Besides the 20 million gallons of ethanol for automotive fuel, our technology will also produce a molasses for high-energy livestock feed and a powdered lignin biofuel that we convert on-site into green thermal and electrical energy. Some of this excess electricity produced can also be sold back to the power grid.’

Inbicon is recent spin-off of Dong Energy, formed out of the technology and engineering group that first began converting biomass to energy in the 1990s. As Denmark's largest energy group, Dong Energy earns $7.6 billion (€5.9 billion) in annual revenues.

The company has 14 years of practical experience gathering, transporting, storing, and handling huge volumes of biomass, currently over a million tons of wheat straw and wood pellets a year.

Biofuels International expo & conference attracted over 500 attendees in 2008 and similar numbers are expected this year.

For full details, to attend, or to view the conference programme please visit www.biofuelsinternationalexpo.com