TMO to export biofuels process to US, China

By Patrick Raleigh, Editor, Process Engineering

London - TMO Renewables Ltd, the developer of a new process for converting biomass into fuel ethanol, has completed a round of financing totalling £11 million from institutional shareholders and private investors. The funds will be used to support the company's entry into the US market, and reflect progress at TMO's process demonstration unit in Surrey, which has recently reached its first anniversary

According to TMO's managment, the US market offer many opportunities for the its second generation biofuels technology, whether it is retro-fitted to improve existing corn ethanol plant yields by 10% to 15%, or applied to new-build, ‘non-food’ biofuel facilities.

"This investment will enable us to engage fully those clients for whom we have successfully trialled a wide range of feedstocks – from grasses and wheat straw, to newspaper, municipal waste and distillers' grains, a by-product of the traditional corn ethanol process,” said Hamish Curran, chief executive.

Curran believes that prospects for the biofuels sector remain strong, helped by a new regulatory environment, especially in the US, where the government is keen to support the country's energy independence. The CEO also forecast major opportunities for TMO in China, where there is "a huge appetite and, growing mandates, for renewable fuel."

The conventional ethanol-from-corn process in which feedstock is broken down, by pre-treatment methods involving the application of enzymes, into a simple sugar and then subjected to a yeast-based fermentation which takes a number of days to complete.

This traditional ‘brewing’ process, argues TMO, is energy-intensive since the material requires significant cooling from the high temperature of the pre-treatment process to the low temperature of the fermentation, and then re-heating for the subsequent distillation process. This approach, it said, remains uneconomical for cellulosic biomass because of the costs and time involved in preparing and pre-treating the feedstock, the energy consumed and the capital costs involved in using exotic metallurgy to build large batch reactors.

By contrast, the TMO process exploits two innate properties of the unique organism to deliver a process for the highly efficient production of ethanol from a wide range of cellulose-rich biomass feedstocks. Firstly, by exploiting the high temperature that the organism favours, fermentation can be performed at temperatures of over 60°C.

Since very little cooling or heating is required, there is a significant saving in energy. The heat-loving thermophile grows and produces ethanol very rapidly, it is able to maintain itself at this higher temperature and the resulting intermediate product (the beer) passes on to the purification steps without the need for any additional input of energy, said TMO.

The organism has a preference for consuming the longer chain sugars that derive from the breakup of biomass. This brings a very significant benefit in that a very large portion of the work and cost required to break down biomass to simple sugars, such as glucose, is removed: the TMO fermentation process simply makes ethanol from a starting point ‘farther up the chain’.

The combination of this appetite for complex sugars, the speed at which the organism works and the temperature of the process, sponsors a more cost effective process. By changing the starting point for the fermentation of ethanol, the methods of feedstock preparation, pre-treatment and sugar release are all simplified to a point where a whole process becomes economically viable.

The speed of the fermentation is rapid so vessels reduce in size, driving down capital costs. In fact, almost all of the components at our Demonstration Plant are ‘off-the-shelf’ items of equipment, common in many chemical processes. The pre-treatment conditions are less severe than is required by the conventional route to ethanol from cellulose and so the materials of construction are significantly cheaper, TMO also claims.

TMO describes its industrial process as “supremely scaleable”. Simply by using equipment of the appropriate capacity, the technology will operate smoothly on whatever scale is deemed commercially viable by the customer, the company claims.

To back this point, TMO highlights how it completed the engineering details for a demonstration plant in 2007, beginning construction during the summer. By the end of the year the civil works were nearly complete and the company had commenced installation of the process system. The process vessels and major items of process equipment were fabricated in Burton-on-Trent, transported to the site and installed through open sections of the roof.

The PDU is a multi-feedstock facility that demonstrates the TMO process on an industrial scale. The unit provides clients with the opportunity to have their own particular biomass feedstock processed into ethanol and co-products. This enables them to make rapid and accurate assessment of what we can add to their business. The design of the facility ensures that future process organisms can be trialed on a large scale, prior to transferring them to our clients’ own sites.

Future improvements to the plant include plans for a biobutanol process which will enable the facility to switch rapidly to the production of another biofuel, according to the company.